


the brother and sister who went to hell, part one

by LieutenantSaavik



Series: kora's supernatural rewrite [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angels, Demons, Fallen Angels, Multi, Plot Twists, homophobic gay people and non-homophobic gay people, hot girl summers, more characters i just haven't introduced them yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-17 11:46:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 43,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28848546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LieutenantSaavik/pseuds/LieutenantSaavik
Summary: "THE STORY SO FAR: IN THE BEGINNING THE UNIVERSE WAS CREATED. THIS HAS MADE A LOT OF PEOPLE VERY ANGRY AND HAS BEEN WIDELY REGARDED AS A BAD MOVE."
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Ruby/Sam Winchester, others
Series: kora's supernatural rewrite [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2176365
Comments: 232
Kudos: 233





	1. Prologue

(A voice, low and fluid, gravelly but gentle. It's a Mysterious Man, but you, of course, know it is Cas. Of course it is Cas.)

“Pure dark that twinkling lights begin to pierce. Like pages uncurling, like birth, planets and stars emerge from the blackness. Abstract colour paints the worlds, light like reflection on water. And then water for light to reflect on. And then, from that water, life.” 

A brief pause. The Mysterious Man inhales.

“In the beginning, it’s said, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, empty—and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God, they say, moved upon the surface of the waters, and said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God divided the light from the darkness.” Another breath. This man, who was once an angel, breathes as though he does not yet know how to, or as if he is nervous about what he uses breath for. There is a hitch in his air; he does not know how to own it.

“Hindu people would say differently. Their story begins with a song, and that song begins with, ‘ _ Nāsad āsīn no sad āsīt tadānīṁ nāsīd rajo no vyomā paro yat…'  _ Then, even nothingness was not—nor existence. There was no air then, nor the Heavens beyond it. There was no death, there was no immortality, there was no night and there was no day. Was there then cosmic water, unfathomably deep? At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness. Darkness due to the excess of light, because there was no one to behold that light. All this was only unillumined water. That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing, arose at last—born of the power of heat.’

(The sound of the turning of a page.)

Then words you might find familiar: ‘In the beginning. In the beginning desire descended upon it. That was the primal seed, born of the mind.’ It is claimed: ‘Whence all creation had its origin, He—whether He fashioned it or whether He did not—only He, who surveys it all from Highest Heaven, knows. Or maybe even he does not know.’”

(A book is closed.)

“My siblings and I, in hierarchies, in closed ranks, our wings spread like microfilament lightning to the edges of Time—we were there. We saw the first bolt of brightness, the first sound that split the newborn cosmos. It was created orderly, this universe. Unchangeable axes upon which cold and mammoth spheres revolve. Laws of life and death, of motion and inertia. Creation, preservation, destruction, a holy fibre of which we too were wrought, an energy neither created nor destroyed but reborn and rebirthed over and over. A series of ever-changing, ever-measured closed loops, a universe watched from afar by a Sovereign Creator. It was very much like a -" (a break, a rustle. The voice loses its poetic cadence momentarily, breaking off to say—

“ _ Dean. _ What is that human bauble called.”

(Soft, warm. A different man’s, Dean’s, voice.) “A snow-globe.”

(The first man’s voice returns.) “It was very much like a… snow globe.” (Quietly)“Is it…?”

(Dean’s voice.) “It’s beautiful, Cas. It’s good.”

Cas's returns, buoyed up with new confidence. “A snow globe that was held between its Creator’s hands. A globe that was then - perhaps - placed out of the way on a high shelf. Placed too close to the edge. Because nowhere does any story of creation claim the Sovereign loved his offspring in a way more intimate or careful than would be merited by a toy.”

(A pause. Representations, full of light and colour, of what Castiel describes.)

“There was trouble in the Sovereign’s workshop. My siblings - who once stood wingtip to wingtip in an unbroken line as far as eternity stretched - broke rank. One among them, the one whom we have come to know as Lucifer in time, began to agitate for war. He spoke with words that had not yet been created.  _ He _ created, and as he created, usurped. This was the first imbalance.

He made weapons, sacred blades that could do angels harm. Captivated by his words or fearful of his daggers, many of my siblings followed him, wrought inglorious wounds in his name. There was a war upon the Sovereign’s magnificent glory, and Lucifer’s insurgents lost. They were smote for their arrogance, cast down. Their bodies mutilated, their holy Grace burnt out, they ceased to be angels. They were banished from the Sovereign’s throne, and the planet they fell upon - Earth - allowed them to sink into its soil, and closed up tight behind them.

The rest of us knit together tightly, as if to atone for our siblings’ sin. But a rupture remained. Of the seven firstborn whom the Sovereign always cared for the most - the ArchAngels, the highest of our host - only three remained: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. The others—Azazel the wicked, Vesoviel the lost, and the two who are now known as Beelzebub and Mammon - fell. Their role was filled by their juniors: Uriel, Zadkiel, Jophiel, Kepharel. But the... snow globe… the Sovereign created had cracked. And the Sovereign retreated from us.

Soon, those seven ArchAngels became the only angels to ever see our Sovereign Father’s face. Earth, the prison whose soil restrained proud Lucifer, became the Sovereign’s pride. At our Sovereign’s direction, we became Earth’s angels, and we were loved. Weaving together the colours He had made, we sang the melodies of Space itself.

And Earth brought forth life, with time. This life was not guided, but it was guarded. My siblings’ and my invisible footprints on the sand as the first water-borne creatures struggled onto it. The tide pools, the ponds, the coastal shelves. The oceans and the star-warmed water and the cycles of new seasons, new winds shifting ancient air. Time created creatures, lengthened their limbs and strengthened their lungs. Some moved on four legs, some on two. And here the story focuses on humanity.

(A pause. The scene unfolds before us. Eden-Earth. Prehistory.)

Adam and Lilith were two of the earliest. Brown-skinned and sun-baked, subsisters, plant-gatherers, born of nourished land between two warm rivers. The Sovereign, whom they called ‘God,’ chose them and spoke to them, blessed them with his sacred Word. Lilith did not heed. She ran, and it is said Lucifer emerged to accompany her. Adam was left with no companion but void, so God intervened to create balance once more—and Eve, born of Adam’s extracted rib, took Lilith’s place. 

Eve and Adam. They would have all they desired. God would be their shelter and their rock and their Church, so long as they ate not of one tree. But they did. And they sired Cain and Abel, brothers, authors of the first atrocity Earth had seen. Abel was murdered and Eve birthed Seth, restoring balance once more. These first births began a bloodline.”

The voice of Castiel is overlaid and then replaced by a different male voice and the clacking sounds of typing. Slowly, a man, “Eric Gamble,” is revealed (Chuck equivalent, duh). He’s typing away on a document entitled  _ SUPERNATURAL: Genesis _ , sub-headed Prologue. This is a momentary vision. Soon we are back with Cas, with a visual of Adam and Eve’s bloodline travelling across Earth as Earth shifts away from its Pangea days.

“Abel had no bloodline, as he prematurely died by getting clobbered on the head in a wheat field.”

Dean bursts into a noisy laugh.

“It’s not FUNNY, Dean.”

Dean finally reluctantly sobers. “Sorry, pal.”

Cas takes a breath and continues. “Seth’s bloodline culminated most famously in Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac. Cain’s bloodline is more obscure. Cain begat Enoch, who begat Irad, who begat Mehujael, who begat Methuselah. Children and more children, travelling, moving, marrying, resettling, settling down. For centuries, lives bloomed and died with infinite beauty, without cosmic interference.”

(We see the travelling bloodline, a streak of light, arcing all over the world as time spins by. It begins in the Middle East, crosses to Europe, settles in Mexico City Mexico for a time, then zips up into Kansas. We follow it, zooming in, zooming WAY in, and soon we are in the Winchesters’ house.

“...Until the bloodline came to rest in Lawrence, Kansas.”

(Mary—an immigrant, a dark haired brown-skinned woman in a pale blue nightdress—is tucking her baby Samantha into her crib. It is, of course, the night of the house fire.)

We cut back to "Eric Gamble," who stops typing and wipes his forehead. He turns his laptop to show the document to his sister Amara (it is not clear whether or not Amara is older). Amara nods in approval. "Eric" closes the laptop.

Brief blackout. When we resume, we are back with Mary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i cobbled together a couple different translations of the Nāsadīya Sūkta to provide the song. if you have better one, shoot it my way!
> 
> addendum to the addendum: i used to live in albania, myanmar, and india; i use every cultural aspect of religion with knowledge and care, but i don't know everything & i welcome new knowledge! what i do know is that i don't want the mythology of this little work to be exclusively christian & jewish.


	2. GENESIS.

Mary Winchester - born Maria Cárdenas - carefully tucks her daughter Samantha in. Samantha—Sam—is under a year old. She is a chubby baby with large brown eyes and curling black hair. Mary kisses her on the forehead and murmurs a lulling Spanish lullaby.

_A la nanita nana nanita ella, nanita ella_

_Mi niña tiene sueño bendito sea, bendito sea, bendito sea_

_Fuentecita que corre, clara y sonora_

_Ruiseñor que en la selva, c_ _antando y llora_

_Calla mientras la cuna_

_Se balancea; a la nanita nana, nanita ella..._

Sam is still fussy, and Mary smiles, switching over to a song of her own invention, the melody of which will return.

_Let the world lull you and let the world change; see how I love you, how brilliant and strange_

_You’re warm and safe, dear, while I am right here, under the stars and the night sky so clear._

_Moon after sunset and sun after moon, bright dawn, blue midday, then gold afternoon,_

_All this world’s wonders arrive at daybreak; dream sweetly, and I’ll be here when you wake._

As Mary sings, a young Dean, brown-skinned and freckled, wiggles a hand through the bars of the crib. Sam grasps it clumsily and coos.

John Winchester, light skin, stubble, and jovial eyes, stands in the bedroom doorway, face crinkled up in a smile as he watches Mary sing. “Come on, Dean,” his voice is light and paternal, “Bedtime for you too.”

Dean protests, whines, and John laughs, coming forward and scooping him up, groaning that he’s gotten “so heavy,” making Dean giggle. Mary watches the two of them leave, then turns back to baby Sam and wishes her a soft “goodnight” before following her family out of the room. Young Dean bounds off to bed. Once he's out of earshot, Mary quietly asks John if all the doors and windows have been double locked. John assures her they have.

“You’re getting the feeling again?” he asks long-sufferingly. One of his wife’s irrationalities.

“I just feel like we’re being watched.”

“There’s nobody in the house, Mary. Promise. I know, with the way you grew up—”

A bit sharply, Mary cuts him off. “John, it’s—” she sighs. “Thank you for double-checking.”

He hugs her briefly then heads downstairs to watch TV, leaving Mary to tuck in Dean.

Night settles further over the neighbourhood. It’s quiet, suburban. We see the house from outside, brief peeks at each window. John Winchester is in the living room watching an old black-and-white war movie. Mary is sleeping alone in their shared bed next to the baby monitor. Light suddenly flares in Sam’s bedroom’s window. 

The baby monitor registers noises.

Mary, sleepily, lifts her head. Scrubs her eyes. Checks next to her. No John. Unusual. The alarm reads 10:35 PM. It’s still September 21st.

A voice echoes in Mary’s head; the voice is that of a young man she met years ago. He says “Don’t get up. No matter what you hear that night on September 21st, go back to sleep. Mary, please. For _his_ sake. Don’t. Get. Up.”

The noises from the baby monitor increase. Baby Sam is distressed.

Mary shakes her head to clear it of the memory. She gets up, pads down the hallway toward Sam’s crib. 

The baby mobile is spinning slowly. A man is standing over the crib. “John?” Mary asks, and indicates the baby. “Is she hungry?”

“Shhh,” the man replies soothingly. The nightlight is flickering.

The light downstairs is flickering too. Mary heads to it, pokes it, draws her mouth into an irritated slash, turns it off. Soft light from around the corner; this time it’s John’s war movie. John is on the couch, the light from the TV cast across his slack face. He’s asleep.

If John is here, the figure in Sam’s room can’t be John. Mary wastes no time, racing up the stairs and bursting into Sam’s room, slamming the door wide open. The man at the crib begins to turn. His face and body are roped in shadow but his eyes are a sickly yellow.

CUT.

We’re back with John on the couch.

Mary’s scream ricochets throughout the house. John bolts upright, sprints up the stairs, slams into the nursery, face panicked. Rushes to the crib. There’s spots of blood on Sam’s white baby blankets. Terrified, John tears the blankets off. No wounds on Sam; it’s not her blood.

Sam is staring straight upward. John follows his daughter’s frozen gaze.

Mary is pinned with a supernatural (heehee) force to the ceiling, bleeding from her chest and stomach. Mary opens her mouth but can’t force out any words. John screams. Sam wails.

Mary bursts into flames. John staggers, falls, tears Sam out of her crib. Bursts into the hallway where a frightened Dean is standing, cuddling a teddy bear. In one desperate motion, John knocks the bear out of Dean’s hands, shoves baby Sam into Dean’s small arms, spins the siblings toward the stairs, and roars,“Get outside and don’t look back! GO!”

Dean, eyes wide, bear forgotten, clutches the wailing Sam and BOLTS. John spins back toward the nursery. It’s an inferno. 

He backs away step by step. In the distance, sirens begin to wail.

CUT.

Dean makes it out of the front door, staggers down the steps all the way to the sidewalk where he collapses, panting. He’s in a little boy’s pajamas, hair messy, eyes still wide with fear. He coughs smoke out of his lungs, looks down at Sam, still bawling. “It’s okay, Sammy,” he murmurs, rocking her as best he can, murmuring how Mary used to. “Shh, shh. Todo va a estar bien. Tranquila. Tranquila, Sammy. Shh, shh, Sammy, hermanita, Sammy, it’s gonna be okay, Sammy, estará bien, estará bien, Sammy, estará - estará bien…”

He raises his eyes to Sam’s window. After a moment, it explodes in shards of glass, flames piercing through where the window once was. Dean stands and screams. “MAMA! DAD!”

A blackened and coughing John Winchester struggles out the front door. Dean keeps crying out “MAMA! MAMA! MAMA!” until John reaches him and Sam, gathers them both into his arms, whereupon Dean sags and cries.

Half an hour later, the neighborhood is chock-full of police, onlookers, and firetrucks, firefighters spraying out the last few stubborn smolders in what’s left of the house. Sitting on the Impala, huddled together, John holds Sam as Dean clings to his hand. Dean’s other hand is trembling, pressed so tight against the Impala’s headlight the tiny knuckles are bleached white. All three of them are filthy, covered in ash and tears. Bedraggled, they blankly watch the remains of their house drown under the fire hoses, everything in it burnt away. 

Close-up on John. The last of the firelight reflects in his eyes, briefly rendering him inhuman.

He looks down at Sam.

  
THEME SONG: “SEPTEMBER” BY EARTH WIND AND FIRE. OBLIGATORY "SUPERNATURAL" TITLE SEQUENCE.

TWENTY TWO YEARS LATER.

A blonde man, Jake Moore, leans around the side of Sam’s dorm room where Sam, a Chicana woman with short shaggy hair and narrowed intelligent eyes is typing away on her laptop. “Come onnnnn,” Jake hollers, hanging to the rim of the doorway with one hand. He’s dressed up as Shaggy from Scooby Doo and has a joint in his hand. 

Sam spins away from the computer. She’s in jeans and a lilac t-shirt, not a costume. “Do I _have_ to?”

“It’s Halloween, hon!”

Jake bounds over to Sam who leans up and kisses him briefly. “What are you even dressed as? God, you reek. Get rid of this thing!” She reaches for the joint to flick it away, smiling.

Jake, grinning hugely, pulls it back in exaggerated mock-offense. “I’m Shaggy,” he says. “And this is my sidekick,” he waggles the joint, “Scooby- _Doobie_ -Doo!” 

Sam snorts, and Jake giggles, pleased that he’s coaxed some joy out of his girlfriend. He lays a beseeching hand on her shoulder. “Come on. We were supposed to be there like fifteen minutes ago.”

“All right.”

Jake sobers a bit, and his voice turns soft. “Hey, Sam. If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to. I just think - it would be good for you to get out a bit, loosen up. It’s been a rough semester for everyone, ya know?" He holds his hands up. "But if you hate it, we can come right back here, eat candy and binge Netflix instead. No anxieties. Promise.” He gives her a sober look. “You took your meds this morning?”

Sam nods. “Yep.”

“Mmm.” Jake touches her on the side of her face, prompting Sam to smile wider, and he gathers her into a hug. “But seriously,” he mutters into her shoulder, “You gotta wear a costume, ’Mantha”

Sam rolls her eyes and swats him on the shoulder. “ _Fine_.”

CUT.

We’re at a bar frequently populated by college kids. The Monster Mash is pounding through the speakers. A typical Halloween scene from back when it was, ya know, legal to interact with people. Decorations everywhere. Jake and Sam are sitting next to each other, hands clasped. Three or four other people are also at the table, already laughing, tipsy Halloween roisterers. Sam is reluctantly dressed as Velma.

“Three cheers to Sam and her LSAT score!” Jake prompts. “It’s so good it’s almost,” he dangles a fake spider over her head, “Scaaaaaary!”

Sam laughs, bats the spider away, leans in to kiss Jake as their friends send up a whoop and ask for another round. Snippets of dialogue from the table drift in over the music - Sam’s score was 174, “better than Elle Woods.” She has an interview on Monday, a chance for a full ride next semester. Playful accusations of cheating on the LSAT are laughingly denied. More drinks. More giggles. Jake calls out “SamANTHA WinCHESTER” in pretend-rage as Sam tries and fails to slip a spider down the front of his shirt. Sam’s happy, social, supported. She’s flushed but not as drunk as any of her friends. We focus on her face as she grins at something Jake says. 

“Another round?” one of the friends, Luis, asks.

“Nah,” Sam says. “I always cut myself off after two.”

“Sam, it’s Halloween. And out-Elle-Woods’ed _Elle Woods_. Did you tell your dad and brother?” 

Sam's smile vanishes. Instant stillness.

“No,” Sam snaps.

Luis tilts his head. “Why not?”

“I don’t really talk to them.” Sam runs a hand through her hair and takes off her fake Velma glasses.

Luis can’t read the room. “Why not?”

Sam's words are dull and rote. “When I told Dad I wanted to go to college, he said if I walked out the door I’d never come back.” She shrugs. “So I’m not comin’ back. I don’t know about them, they don’t know about me. Fair trade.”

“They’re shitholes,” Jake says seriously. “You’re better off here.”

Sam’s smile flickers back to life and she raises her glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

Jake peers into her glass and guffaws. “Girl, that’s apple juice.”

“So?”

Jake snorts. Glasses clink. Jake wraps an arm around Sam’s shoulders and she leans into his side.

CUT.

Sam and Jake are sleeping back to back in their shitty second-floor off-campus apartment. We travel through the dim rooms. A window by the door is open, sending through a light breeze. With a small grunt, a shadowy man climbs in. 

Two rooms away, Sam’s eyes snap open. The moment the shadowy man enters her bedroom, Sam slams into him, pinning him against the wall.

The man is a fighter. He twists, knocks Sam’s arm away, strikes. She ducks. Undaunted, he swings her around, shoves her back. Sam kicks. Blocked. A quick elbow to the chest and Sam’s sent sprawling. She's pinned to the floor gently. The assailant is not trying to hurt Sam; he’s trying to prevent a kicking Sam from hurting _him_.

“Whoa,” he says to the back of her head, amused. “Easy there, Sammy.”

Sam is silent for a second, in shock. “Dean?”

Dean laughs.

Sam smacks him and he releases her easily. “What the fuck was that about?” she snaps, sitting upright and flaring with incandescent rage.

Dean winces, only now realising this might have been a bad idea. “Um, Happy Halloween?”

“This is my home, this is - I thought you were trying to - jesus christ on a fishstick nugget motherfucking shit! I hate you! You scared the bejeezus outta me!”

Dean reaches across and drops a hand on her shoulder. We might realise now that he’s slightly drunk. “That’s cuz you’re out of practice, sis.”

Sam grabs Dean’s forearm and yanks it hard, slamming her heel into Dean’s back and wrenching him to the floor as he yelps. She twists his arm behind his back. “Am I?”

“Ouch, shit!” Dean slaps the floor in the universal gesture for surrender. “Come on, lemme up.”

Sam lets him up. They stand just as Jake turns on the lights. 

“Hi, what the fuck?” Jake asks.

Sam rolls her eyes. “Jake. Meet my brother.”

Dean smiles and winks. “Ey.”

“Whore,” says Jake without missing a beat.

Sam glares at Dean. “Why are you here?”

“Oh, nice to see you too-”

“Why are you here?”

Dean’s smile fades. “We need to talk.”

“You could’ve called me.”

“You blocked my number,” Dean points out. “And you wouldnt’ve answered anyway.”

Sam can’t argue that point. “You didn’t need to break in.”

“I was hoping I could just crash on your couch, talk to you guys in the morning.”

“Oh, just climb in the window while we were asleep and camp out here.”

“Um…” Dean rubs a hand up the back of his neck. “That was kind of the idea, yeah.” He sighs. “Look, I’m almost outta cash. It was this or sleep in the Impala and in case you haven’t noticed, it’s buttfuck _cold_.”

“Fine.” Sam remembers Jake is still there. “Oh. This guy’s Dean.”

“Ey,” Dean says again.

Jake is unmoved. “You already said that.”

“Ah. Right.” Dean swallows. “Uh, not sure how to put this politely, James—”

“Jake.”

“Jake, you gotta, you know,” Dean gestures.

“Huh?” Jake asks.

“You know,” Dean repeats the shooing gesture. “Skedaddle. Scram.”

Jake literally cannot believe this dude. “Bruh. This is _my_ apartment.”

“But this is _my_ sister, and we have some private family business to discuss.”

“No, we don’t,” Sam snaps. “Anything you have to say to me, you say it in front of Jake.”

Dean’s eyes flick between Sam to Jake. This is clearly not a battle he will win. 

“Dad hasn’t been home in a few days,” he says out of the corner of his mouth.

Sam folds her arms. “He’ll stagger in eventually.”

Dean sighs, puts back on his normal voice. “Dad’s out on a hunting trip. And he hasn’t been home in a few days.”

Instant alarm on Sam’s face. “Jake,” she tells him, “Dean and I gotta talk.”

Jake gives Sam a hard look. “Okay.”

CUT.

Sam and Dean head downstairs. Sam has shoved on jeans and wrapped herself in a sweater, gesticulating as she speaks. “You can’t just break in, in the middle of the night, and expect me to, what, run away?”

“You’re not hearing me, Sammy. Dad’s missing. I need you to help me find him.”

“No.”

“Sam—”

“No! You remember the poltergeist in Amherst? The Shapeshifter in Springfield? The Devil's Gate in Clifton? He was missing then, too. He's always missing, and he's _always fine_.”

Dean stops and turns around. He scrubs a hand down his face. “Not this time.”

“Dean, I’m sorry, but I’m done. I’m done hunting, I’m done shooting, I’m _done_ _._ For good.”

“Come on, it wasn’t that bad.”

Flatly, “When I told Dad I was afraid of the shadows in my closet, he gave me a .45.”

Dean throws his hands out. “What was he supposed to do?!”

“I was nine years old! He was supposed to say ‘don't be scared of the dark’ or something! A gun instead of a hug, Dean, it’s not—”

Dean scoffs derisively. “Of course you’re supposed to be scared of the dark. Don’t you know half the shit that’s out there?!” 

“Dean, I hate it! The way we grew up, moving, hiking, lying, _hunting,_ packing everything we ever owned—" her voice tips up, "And it was worse for _me_ , you know that? Bad enough that I’m younger, but,” she flings her long arms out to her sides, “I had the audacity to be a _girl._ Let’s face it, I should’ve been a boy, but no amount of buzzing my hair or borrowing his flannels would ever make me feel like one. I was his daughter and he never - knew how to cope with that. I tried to be like him, like you, but it never felt right—it wasn’t me. I want—I want to wear a skirt every once in a while, I want to let my hair grow to my shoulders again, I want to find out who the fuck I am when I’m not—”

“God,” Dean says, his voice laced with more violent disgust than Sam has ever heard. “Skirts and makeup. _These_ are your problems.”

“It’s not just that, Dean! Shit motels, food poisoning, silver bullets, salt rounds, target practice every evening—washing blood out of dad’s clothes—you think Mom would’ve wanted this for us?”

Dean shuts down. Now he’s _pissed._ “Yeah?” he grits out. “Well, Mom’s _dead_. And Dad actually _cares_.” He lets that linger. “Which is why he’s hellbent on catching the thing that killed her, but maybe it got _him_ and he needs our help.”

Sam is icy silent.

“Sam. We’ve saved a lot of people, killin’ monsters ‘n ghouls. And this is Dad. He, I mean—Sammy,” Dean’s voice cracks a bit, “Do you wanna be an orphan?”

Sam’s face is frigid. “I already am.”

“So, what, you’re fine to give it all up for, for what? Some boytoy, a degree and a desk job?”

“I want to be safe.” Sam whips around, enraged. “I want a safe life, a normal life. With Jake.” She drops her voice. “I—I like it here, Dean. I like _myself_ here.”

“And that’s why you ran away.” Dean can’t look at his sister. It was a betrayal.

“I just wanted to go to college. It was Dad who said if I was gonna go I should stay gone.” Nastily, she adds, “I’m only doing what he said.”

Dean blinks. “He said that?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, well, Dad's in real trouble right now, if he's not dead already. And how would you feel if I go off without you and I find him bloody and I can’t save him and he dies while you sit up here in rich-bitch California knowing you could’ve helped?”

Sam is quiet. 

“Sam, I can't do this alone.”

“Yes, Dean, you can. You have been.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to.”

Sam sighs and looks down, thinking, then back up. “Where was Dad last seen?”

“He was checking out housefires just outside of Jericho, California. He said…” 

“What,” Sam snaps.

“He said it was a demon.”

Sam blinks, then nods.

Dean recalibrates. “That doesn’t, that doesn’t throw you for a loop at all?”

Sam shakes her head. “Not really.”

“Really?”

“I believe in this stuff, Dean. I pray.”

“You, you actually—”

“Yes.”

Dean looks at her. She stares back, her jaw set.

“So… you coming?” Dean shifts side to side, buries his uncertain hands in the pockets of John’s leather jacket. It’s brown and beat-up and and too big, widening his shoulders.

Sam exhales. Her face crumples. She nods.

CUT.

We’re with Sam in the apartment. All the lights are on as she tosses clothes, hating that she can’t fold them, into the bag. A knife. Toiletries. Her medications; we don’t see precisely what it’s medication for. 

Jake appears in the doorway, still in pajamas. Wordlessly hands Sam a few things she forgot; her chargers, a Bible. He squats down across from her. “Taking off?”

Sam bites her lip. “Yeah.”

“Is this about your dad? Is he all right?”

Sam considers lying. Doesn’t want to lie to Jake. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“I can call, try to put off the interview—”

“No,” Sam stops him quickly. “I’ll be back by Monday. It’s just a weekend trip. Family drama.”

Jake stands to help her pack a couple more jackets. “You sure you’re okay?”

Sam snorts, as if that’s a funny question. “I’m fine.”

“Sam, you’ve never talked about your family except to say that you categorically _don’t_ spend time with them. And now you’re racing off to, ya know… spend time with them. Without warning in the middle of the night with your, I mean frankly, your brother isn’t exactly an inspiring specimen of an upstanding human being or whatever." Jake pulls Sam's favourite shirt out of a drawer and tosses it in her direction. "Not that he’s a criminal or dangerous or that he’d hurt you or anything, of course,” he adds hurriedly, “But he did literally break in, and, I mean - I’m worried. About you.”

Sam is moved. In her life experience, instances of people demonstrating vocal concern for her has been few and far between. She stands and takes Jake's hand, running her thumb over his knuckles. “I’ll be okay. Everything’s gonna be okay, promise.”

“At least tell me where you’re going.”

Sam shakes her head. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

Jake nods. “Why not?”

“I just—I have to keep it separate, Jake. Family and me. Family and… this. us, what we have. You’re someone I care about, and I don’t, I _can’t_ mix it with,” she trails off. “I’m sorry.”

Jake understands that it’s important to her. He doesn’t understand why, because Sam didn’t tell him, but he doesn’t have to. He cares for her. “I’ll miss you, ’Mantha. Take care.”

“You too. I—” Sam has words on the tip of her tongue. Chickens out. “I’ll be back soon.”

She kisses him on the cheek. 

Jake smiles wanly, catching her hand and squeezing it once more as she leaves. Her fingers fall from his one by one; she’s reluctant to go. “See ya.”

CUT.

The Impala. Dean turning on the engine. Looking to his side to see Sam in the passenger seat. She's staring out at the California neighborhood she knows. It’s not upscale; it’s dusty and rent’s too high and it’s far from the city and there’s not enough plants and in the summer heat it stinks like trash and there are sinkholes in the roads and the county board’s corrupt, but it’s beautiful because it’s Sam’s chosen home. She watches it recede as the Impala pulls away. Jake is waving from the apartment complex’s front door. Sam waves back. Dean rolls his eyes and accelerates.

He cranks on the radio, 'It’s My Life' by Bon Jovi. Sam tries to change it. INSTANT fall-back into the sibling bicker that characterised their early years of living together, and for a moment it’s like nothing changed. Dean insists, "Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts her cakehole!" For a moment their circumstances fall away and it’s just two siblings on a road trip through a cricket-filled night. 

It only lasts a few seconds. Then Sam is silent again.

CUT. They’ve been on the road for a while now. The music is a steady beat of 'Can’t Get No Satisfaction' by the Rolling Stones, so Dean clearly won the battle.

“We’re not heading toward Jericho,” Sam observes, watching a road sign zip by and disappear into the dimness. There’s something expansive and anonymous about the American highways. So uniform, linking an entire crazy nation together with tar and signs, stretching sea to sea like a nervous system. 

Dean looks over. “Not yet. I looked through Dad’s journal.”

“You got leads?”

“Ellen left a message on one of his phones.”

“Ellen?”

“Harvelle. New owner of the Roadhouse.”

Sam looks blank. 

“Dude, Dad took us there all the time.”

“Oh.” Sam winces. Bad memories; adult men had harassed her there, and John had mostly turned a blind eye. “The Hunter bar.” 

“Yeah. Owned by Bill Harvelle. When he died, it was taken over by his wife ’n kid. Most of the community don’t like them much, think they're sus.”

“Mr. Harvelle died?”

Dean snorts at Sam referring to him as ‘mister.’ “Yeah, well, lots happened while you were away.”

“Where is it again?”

“Lauchlin. Border city between AZ, Nevada and Cali.”

“How far?”

Dean looks down at the clock on the dash. “Eh, six hours?”

Sam employs the entire capacity of her lungs. “WHAT.”

“Come on, Sam, it’s a big country.”

“You can’t expect to drive the whole way!”

“Why not?”

“Dude, that’s almost eight hours total.”

“So?”

“You need sleep, for one thing.”

Dean laughs and ruffles Sam’s hair and accelerates again.

“Jerk.”

“Bitch.”

Sam is smiling. Dean looks over at her. “What?”

Sam shrugs. A slight crack in her reluctance. “It’s been a couple years. Guess I missed you.”

“Pfff.”

She rolls her eyes. “I know. I’m shocked too.”

Dean smiles. He turns the music down so Sam can get some rest. Stops smiling when Sam turns away.

CUT.

It’s lightening up outside; a few birds are chirping. Early morning. The Winchesters are in a parking lot outside the Roadhouse, which I won’t waste time describing because I’m sure you can visualise it. The lot is empty except for them.

The landscape has changed from the grasses and trees of Palo Alto to the dusky desert dirt of the Nevada-Arizona border. Low mountains, some scraggly cacti. A vivid cloudless sky; the day promises to be what locals would call “a scorcher.” Dean's put on sunglasses that hide his eye-bags. He’s barely slept all night. Sam has seven cricks in her neck and complains about them vocally as they clamber out of the car.

The Roadhouse door is locked. Dean knocks. No response, so he picks the lock as Sam looks on disapprovingly. The door eases open with a creak.

The front room, a capacious bar, is dirty. Empty, but light makes its way in through the windows, falling in wide dusty swaths to the floor. Sam and Dean wordlessly separate, Sam heading toward one back room, Dean toward another.

Dean crosses the floor and goes down a small set of steps, then stops, feeling the point of a gun press into his back.

He groans. “Oh, god please let that be a rifle.”

A snort from behind him, but the gun cocks nonetheless. “Nah, I’m just real happy to see you.”

Dean shifts. The rifle presses harder into his back. “Don’t move,” the girl orders.

Dean sighs, exasperated and not concerned whatsoever. “You should know something, miss? When you pull a rifle on someone, you don't put it right against their back. Because it makes it real easy for them to do,” he whirls, grabs the gun from Jo, and aims it at her. “That.”

Jo raises her hands. “Dean.”

She’s roughly twenty years old. Muslim. Her mother Ellen’s maiden name was Din before she married a white American and changed it to Harvelle. Jo has brown skin, black eyes, a soft hooked nose, and wears a headscarf over a black turtleneck and straight-leg jeans. 

Dean drops the gun and hands it back with a nod. “Jo.”

Jo raises an eyebrow. “Long time no see.”

“Sorry about that.”

Jo nods. "Hunter code?" (A question a ghoul or shapeshifter wouldn't know the answer to - in this case 'who are you named after' - and a string of numbers only hunters know.)

Dean grimaces. "Deanna Winchester, and, um... 8752064359017. Where’s Sam?”

“A little tied up,” comes Sam’s voice from the doorway, and we see her walking toward Dean. Ellen Harvelle, who looks like an older Jo except her hair is loose and graying, is behind him pointing a handgun at his head. “Jo,” Ellen orders. “Silver and holy water.”

“Right,” Jo scrambles in her pocket. “Sorry.” She presses an ornate stick of metal to Sam's forearm, then Dean's, and hits them both with holy water. “Clear!”

Ellen takes the handgun down. “Winchesters,” she greets them.

“Hi—” Sam starts, but Dean gets right to it. “You called our dad, said you could ‘help.’ Help with what?”

Ellen blinks. “The demon, of course. I heard he was closing in on it.”

“What, was there a Demon Hunters Quarterly _tweet_ I missed? I mean, how do you know about all this? You were never in the business.”

“My husband was. You’d be surprised what you pick up. I’m no idiot, Dean.” Ellen sighs, already weary. “Jo, hit the lights. No reason to stand around in the dark like rubberneckers. If this were a TV show, all the annoyed viewers would repeatedly have to crank their screen brightness up, and nobody wants that.”

Jo flicks the lights on. Ellen gestures for the Winchesters to follow her into the main room, and Jo gets behind the bar and courteously turns on a tap of beer. 

“Hunters still pass through here every day,” Ellen remarks instead of saying nothing. “Me and Jo, we aren’t exactly popular. Most folks expect to see my husband behind the counter.”

“Here.” Jo hands over the beers. Dean takes one gratefully. Sam leaves hers untouched.

“But you’re not a hunter yourself,” Dean summarizes.

Ellen shakes her head. “Not usually. More of a liaison. Ash digs up lore, Jo speedreads it, I distribute it to all interested parties back-to-back with running the Roadhouse here.”

“Sounds like all the bad parts of the life with none of the good,” Dean snorts.

“I’m not raising Ash and Jo in the business, Dean. They deserve better.”

“Ash is, he’s your kid too?”

Ellen shrugs. “Effectively.” She doesn’t elaborate.

“What, Jo, he your husband or..?”

“No,” Jo says hurriedly. “Ew.”

“So, Jo, you’re single?” Dean winks. Sam smacks him.

“Dean,” Ellen warns. Jo suppresses a smile.

“If you’re not a hunter,” Dean asks Ellen bluntly, “Why do we need your help?”

Ellen scoffs. She’s a harsh person. “Look, if you don't want my help, fine, don't let the door smack your ass on the way out. But John wouldn't have sent you if…” She stops, realising. “He didn't send you.”

Dean looks down, then at Sam.

“He’s all right, isn’t he?” Jo asks, a note of anxiety in her voice.

“He is,” Ellen confirms. “He called me yesterday.”

“Yesterday?!”

“He didn’t want me to know where he is. He was just asking for information. But he’s fine, and he’s coming back to his kids.”

“Why didn’t he tell _us_ that?” Sam snaps.

“Look,” Dean cuts in, irked, “If you _can_ help, please just, ya know, _do._ ”

“Well, I can't. But Ash can.” Ellen tilts back her head and, with an almost supernaturally (hehe) loud holler, screams “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH!”

A few moments pass. Comically loud thumping and bumping, glass shattering, metal crunching, a chainsaw revving up and back down, a dr. who tardis noise, a coffee machine, a vacuum cleaner, a few more glass crashes for good measure. After a few moments, Ash, sandy hair in a mullet, flops down the stairs in a battered tank top and underwear but no pants. 

“It’s more of a dick out look,” he says by way of an introduction.

“You've gotta be kidding me,” Dean mutters. “This man’s an insane Lynyrd Skynyrd roadie.” Ash hears him, scrubs his eyes, and finally lands his ass by the bar, spinning twice around in his chair. “I prefer the term groupie and RPF connoisseur.”

Sam laughs. Jo groans.

Dean sighs heavily, reaches into his back pocket and pulls out Dad’s journal, slapping it on the counter. He turns to the first few pages that deal with the demon. “All right. This stuff's about a year's worth of our dad's work, so uh. Let's see whatcha make of it.”

Ash starts rifling through the book. He shakes his head. “Come on. This crap ain't real. There’s nobody who can track a demon like this.”

“Our dad could,” Dean counters.

“There are non-parametrics, statistical overviews, prospects and correlations, I mean.. damn! They're signs. Omens.” Off Sam’s and Dean’s blank looks, “Uh, if you can track the omens, you can track the demon. You know, like crop failures, electrical storms... Huh. You ever been struck by lightning?" A full-body shudder. "It ain't fun.”

“Can you track the thing or not?” Dean asks testily. 

“Yeah, with this, I think so. But it's gonna take time. Give me, uh…” He counts on his fingers. “Sixty-nine hours.”

“Nice,” say Sam and Dean in unison.

“I’m kidding, I can crack this case in roughly thirty five.” Unceremoniously, he gets up to leave. 

“Hey, man,” Dean stops him with a hand on his arm. Ash turns. “I uh, I dig the haircut.”

Ash strikes a pose. “All business up front, party in the back. Catch ya later, sluts.”

He walks up the stairs, already back to snoring.

“So that’s it?” Sam asks, looking around. “We just head out? Drive back?”

"Nah, can't leave without the journal. We gotta spend the night, wait for Ash to be done with that thing. I'll sleep in the Impala..." his eyes slide over to Jo, "Unless..."

“Stop,” says Ellen firmly, but Jo rolls her eyes at her mom. 

“I’ve dealt with worse,” she mutters.

“Can I have some water?” Sam finally asks. As Jo scoots off to get it, Jake calls in.

“One moment,” Sam mutters and swings away from the bar, striding out of the Roadhouse and into the bright parking lot.

Shielding her eyes, she answers the call. “Hey, Jake.”

“Hey, ’Mantha. You doin’ ok?”

“Yeah. We’re meeting up with some of my dad’s… friends. They seem nice." Off Jake's skeptical pause, "Really.”

“Okay. Anything I can, I dunno, help with?”

“It’s cool. I’ll be back by Monday.”

“You slept and everything?”

“Yep." Sam smiles. "You don’t need to worry about me!”

“Yeah I do. Take care.”

“You too, babe.”

A few moments after she clicks off the call, Dean sidles out to join her, leans against the wall in an unconscious mirror of her position. “Doin’ ok?”

“What-ever.”

“We’re just gonna camp out here until Ash cracks the case, okay?”

That's information Sam already knows. “Okay.”

Sam’s phone rings again. She lifts it to her ear; it’s Jake again.

“Sam! I forgot to say! Don’t forget your meds.”

“Sh—sugar,” Sam almost-swears. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll take them.” She shakes her head, forgetting Jake can’t see. “What would I do without you?”

She can practically hear Jake’s smile. “Crash and burn. I’m kidding. I love ya.”

“You too.”

She hangs up again, meets Dean’s confused expression. “What?”

“Meds?” Dean asks. 

“Yeah,” says Sam evasively. “I’ve got a… thing.”

“Like… a sickness or, ya know… a brain thing?”

Sam’s gaze is flat. She stares out at the landscape. “A brain thing.”

“What? Dude.” Dean scans her face. “You’re not joking?”

“Nope.”

“So you, so you,” Dean tries to work this out in his mind, “Gotta take crazy pills?”

“Antidepressants, yes.”

“Oh, so my sister turned psychotic. That’s great.”

“I’m not—” Sam tries with great effort to control herself. Sand pushes up in small eddies around her feet. “Like you said.” She forces a tight, smile. “Lots of stuff happened when I was away.” She’s moved past ‘pissed’ and is headed closer to a dull emotionlessness. “You were glad when I left, weren’t you?”

“What? No.”

“Well," Sam continues reasonably, "You finally got all of Dad’s attention."

“What the fuck, Sam?”

“What did you come out here for?” Sam asks. “It clearly wasn’t just to talk to me.”

“Fine. Ellen said there’s a vamp nest couple towns over in Aldale; she and Jo were going to take care of it if nobody else volunteered. Just one or two, no threat in daylight. Could help you get back in the swing of things.”

Sam looks out at the horizon, stringy hair flapping against her face. It's not fine. “Fine.”

QUICK N DIRTY MONTAGE! Sam and Dean driving down a hypnotically American stretch of highway, Sam staring out the window, Dean vibing to his music and making duck faces and dancing his hands on the steering wheel. The arrival at the small town, quick conversations with locals, brief talk of the “exsanguinated corpse” of a young man. We see for the first time all the weapons and costumes in the back of the car; Dean takes two stakes and a machete and bids Sam do the same. Because this bit doesn’t have any sexy sexy thematic resonance it is mostly confined to montage until we actually arrive at the vampire nest. It’s an abandoned shed behind what was once a residence. The shed is still standing alone but it has fallen into disrepair, scrubbed down to bare smooth wood by the sandy desert wind and incessant sun.

There are two vampires, both men, in an abandoned shed, sleeping in a grey makeshift bed. Blood stains their clothing and mouths. No visible fangs. Their chests move. They look like they are people. Sleeping people. A couple.

Dean doesn’t hesitate, draws his machete and decapitates the closer vampire in a swift violent movement, drops to his knees and digs a stake into its heart.

The second vampire wakes, wails, flings himself at Sam, who holds the stake up with a weaker hand, more out of self-defence than anything else. It embeds itself in his shoulder with a gristly crunch. He shouts in pain, turns to his partner, seeing his brutalized body. “Neil,” he manages, turning toward the corpse in despair—just as Dean jams the second stake into his back.

“SAM,” Dean shouts, “Finish him!”

The vampire is choking, scrambling to try to remove the stake, and Sam shouts “DUCK,” swings her machete in an arc at the vampire’s head. Just as it makes contact with his skin,

CUT.

Sam and Dean preparing to burn the vampires’ bodies. Dean has them lying next to each other about a foot apart, staring at them and their severed heads disgustedly. Sam pushes the two corpses together. Dean gives her a strange look. “They’re monsters, Sammy.”

Sam shrugs. They pour gasoline.

CUT. The bodies burn. 

CUT.

Sam and Dean arrive back at the roadhouse parking lot, dirty and sweaty. Dean cuts the engine and puts his hands behind his head, pushing his seat back and preparing to crash.

“You’re just gonna... nap?”

Dean grins without opening his eyes. “Yep.”

“You stink.”

Dean shrugs.

Sam rolls her eyes, strips to her tank top, and heads into the roadhouse to take a sink shower. Afterward, she realises how hungry she is. Jo, scarf gone now, hears Sam’s stomach growling and decides to grill a couple sandwiches, surprising a delighted Sam. They sit on the barstools next to each other, and Jo asks with a hint of longing about what college is like. They talk in low voices, Jo smiling occasionally, until Sam decides to take Dean some food.

In the Impala, Dean’s hunched over the steering wheel. His shoulders seem like they might be shaking. After a couple moments of deliberation, Sam purposefully makes tons of noise walking over to the driver’s side of the car, and when she hands Dean's food over, he's smiling.

“Hell yeah,” he says, biting into the massive grilled cheese. “Mmm. I wanna _kiss_ Jo for this.”

“Huh,” says Jo, amused. After rewrapping her hair, she’d followed Sam out. “Maybe later.”

Dean startles. The women laugh.

You know those things in movies where they show the passage of time through a character being in one spot in a room and then it fades and they’re in another spot of the room and then it fades and they’re in another spot? Anyway, picture one of those things except with Dean, Sam, Ellen, and Jo at the roadhouse bar. Dean and Jo flirting (or rather Dean flirting with Jo) until guests come in, whereupon Jo gets up to serve them. Ellen cooking in the back. Sam scrolling through her phone, texting Jake or Luis, pacing around the room muttering job interview practice to herself. Customers coming in and out, some hunters, some not, until finally the Roadhouse closes and it’s night. Dean is sleeping soundly in the Impala, Sam is sleeping fitfully on a borrowed blanket in the back room, and Jo and Ellen are sleeping like normal fuckin people in their bedrooms upstairs. Ash is dedicated, switching between two laptops with John’s journal open and spread out beside him. He hasn’t moved in hours. Finally, he blinks, pushes his chair away from his worktable, stands and rubs his eyes, and lets out a long, relieved moan.

CUT.

Jo, Ash, Ellen, Sam, and Dean sitting at the bar with a light on over their heads. Ash has slammed the second laptop, radio-laptop-hybrid, a homemade mess of rigged wires that appears to be an inch away from exploding, onto the bar.

“Do we have its name?” Sam is asking.

Ash shakes his head. “Not yet. Lemme just—lemme just explain. There’s been house fires just like yours, Sam, Dean. You’re not the only ones.”

Dean spreads his hands. “Okay…?”

“I mean, exactly like yours. Most of them in practicing Jewish families, weirdly enough, but—” Ash shakes his head. “It’s religious people. Bible Belt Christians. Muslim immigrants. They get house fires too, always when there’s an infant in the house, always beginning in that infant’s bedroom. Usually killing a parent or two. This demon—he’s killed a lot more people than Mary. Mothers and fathers, predominantly mothers. He’s got a body count, man. He… he likes to burn houses. A lot.”

He looks at them closely, watching how they take the information, before he carefully goes on. “And there are—events that have led up to these house fires. Like, specific repeated events.” He rattles them off. “Typical signs like electrical storms, crop failures, but also nicher shit. An increase of political corruption, strangely scorched earth, sinkholes, massive food poisoning, reports of domestic violence, sporadic motiveless murders, and dead farm animals—especially goats. All these are this demon’s signs. Omens.”

“That just sounds like my neighbourhood,” Sam mutters, unimpressed.

Ash ignores her. “These omens show up right before the demon _acts_. And his acts are the—” he gestures. “Ya know.”

“Our mom’s murder,” Dean says flatly. He reels. "How many... others?"

Ash shrugs. “He’s shown no signs of stopping."

"All this time, twenty-two years, he's been..."

"Yeah. And probably before your fire, too."

Sam covers her hand with her mouth.

Ash, uncomfortable, goes on. "So. I’ve put out feelers all over the web. Security cams. Twitter. Facebook. Newsfeeds. Police radio. Any whispers of these omens in the hunter network, among psychics, Occultists, Satanists, the Ghostfacers, even, and this algorithm sends their locations straight to you. If this fugly bastard raises his head anywhere in the continental US, we’ll know.”

“Um, what if he ‘raises his head’ outside America?” Sam questions.

Ash blows a spurt of air through his lips. “He’s only active in America, as far as I know.” He raises his hands. “Before you ask, I dunno why, but I think it’s got a lot to do with toxic faith we’ve got, or he’s somehow continentally bound. Maybe he can only operate between people who believe in him. But anyway. Keep this on you,” he pats the radio-laptop-hybrid-thing, “And the second any of his signs show up, you’ll get an alert that it’s your man. Er, demon. Make sense?”

Dean nods slowly, takes the device.

“Most recent report of his omens was less than a month ago, Serendipity, Utah." Ash snaps his fingers, his mind changing tracks at lightspeed. “Oh! And that's where John is. I ran a trace on the voicemail he left on Ellen’s phone. He’s definitely tracking this demon too.”

“Serendipity, Utah?” Dean confirms.

"Yeppo."

“Thanks.”

CUT.

Sam and Dean are leaving the roadhouse, Dean carrying Ash’s device.

“That’s it?” Sam asks. “Like, we just _leave_?”

“We _said_ thank you.”

Sam shrugs. “Seems rude, is all. We ate their food without paying, and—”

“That’s what bothers you about all this. Eating their food, which they _offered us_ , without paying.”

“I mean, kind of, yeah.”

Dean gives his sister a look of incredulity, then just shakes his head, climbing into the car. “Off to Serendipity? Hey, if we shag ass we could make it by tomorrow. I’ll even let you pick the music. Well, for an hour or so.”

Sam looks at him, hesitating. “Dean, I, um…”

Dean glances at the car dashboard, then back. A silence; he visibly deflates. “You’re not going.”

“The interview’s in like, ten hours. I gotta be there.”

Dean nods, disappointed, and returns his attention to his car, starting her up with a gentle touch. “Yeah. Yeah, whatever.” He glances at Sam again. Sam doesn’t move, and Dean rolls his eyes. “Well, get in the car, idiot. I won’t let you hitchhike back to California! There are creeps out there. Come on, I’ll take you home.” 

CUT.

The Winchesters drive in silence for a bit. Dean looks over at Sam. “You're really serious about this, aren't you? You think you're just going to become some lawyer chick? Marry your boyfriend, live out the rest of your days in, I dunno, McBoring Menlo Park?

“Maybe. Why not?”

“Does James—”

“Jake.”

“Jake, fine, does Jake even know the truth about this family? I mean, does he know about the things you’ve done?”

“No, and he's not ever going to know.”

Dean snorts. “Well, that's healthy.”

“It _is_.”

“You can pretend all you want, Sammy, but sooner or later you're gonna have to face up to it. You’re a hunter. You're one of us.”

“No,” Sam replies simply. “I’m not like you. This is not going to be my life. I don’t have a responsibility to Dad’s crusade.”

Dean turns in his seat. “What?”

Sam doubles down. “And Mom’s dead, so I sure as hell don’t have a responsibility to her! If it weren't for pictures I wouldn't even know what she looks like!” She quiets a little. “And Dean... say we kill this demon. Say we shoot it in the forehead, revenge, justice, whatever. Mom’s still gone. Along with all she could’ve been to us.”

“We can prevent her _brutal murder_ from happening to other people, Sam,” Dean snaps, his voice dangerous, his hands tight and blanching on the wheel.

“ _You_ can. I want to do my good in other ways. There are other ways, Dean.”

Dean scoffs. He can’t think of any other ways. He cranks the music: it’s AC/DC’s 'Highway to Hell.'

Sam looks at her phone. She’s texted Jake that she’ll be back soon. Jake replied that he’d wait up for her and added a couple hearts and a smiley face emoji. A smile fights its way out onto Sam's face. Goddamn, she loves this man.

CUT. 

Faint noise of an electrical storm in the distance. They’re pulling back in to Sam’s California neighborhood, right outside the apartment she shares with Jake. 

“Call me if you hear anything about Dad," Sam says as she clambers out of the car. "Or the demon.”

"Course."

“And maybe I can meet up with you later, huh? Cup of coffee or something…” She realises how stupid that sounds and coughs slightly.

Dean is just tired. “All right.”

Sam purses her lips, pats the car door, and turns away.

Dean calls out, "Sam?"

She turns back.

“We made a hell of a team back there, ya know? With the vampires?” He's smiling. It's a peace offering, kind of.

Sam lets it flop. “Sure. Yeah, sure.”

Dean nods, flips a grim joke-salute, drives off without another word. Sam watches him go and sighs.

CUT.

Sam lets herself into her apartment. Everything is dark and quiet, peaceful, just as it was at the start of the episode. 

“Jake?” Sam whispers. She closes the door behind her. “Did you fall asleep on me?”

She kicks off her shoes, pads across the floor, sneaks into the bedroom.

There’s nobody in the bed. Sam looks at it curiously; Jake should be there. She looks toward the bathroom; the door’s ajar, and there’s no-one in it.

A drop of something lands on her hand.

Blood.

She looks up.

Jake is pinned to the ceiling, horror in his eyes. There's a bloody slit all the way down his chest.

Sam lets out a choked scream.

All the omens Ash mentioned, omens that preceded house fires, how she _immediately_ noticed all those signs were just like her neighborhood. Of course. Of course. She was so stupid, she was so—

Jake bursts into fire. 

Sam falls to her knees and screams and screams until her throat is raw. The fire alarm is pounding, the room is burning, engulfed in fire and heat and smoke. 

Someone kicks the door open. Dean. He races across the burning floor, grabs Sam like he had all those years ago. Sam fights him, kicking and screaming for Jake, incoherent, covered in tears and Jake’s blood and snot and soot. Dean bodily heaves her out of the room, hauls her out of the apartment before helping along a stream of other residents. They make it into the parking lot just as flames consume Sam’s windows.

CUT.

Just like the scene at the Winchester fire. A fire truck parked outside the building, police and firemen standing by, onlookers gawking, Sam and Dean leaning against the Impala, watching the remains of a home burn. After a moment, Sam leaves Dean’s side, crosses to the Impala’s trunk, pulls out a shotgun and loads it with perfect muscle memory. Dean looks at the gun, then at Sam, whose face is set in a mask of desperate anger. Hair wild and coated with blood and ash, flames reflected in her eyes, she looks out of her mind. Dean crosses to her. Holds her as she curls toward his chest. 

Sam pushes him away after a while. Wipes her eyes.

“Serendipity, Utah,” she manages, swallowing hard and levelling her chin. “We got work to do.”

CUT.

End music: ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’ by Bastille.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'll keep updating this! comments rlly motivate me. since i've basically recast the entire show, i plan on drawing them to help people visualuse them. i haven't had time yet; still, here's an approximation of [sam](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z63GVuvcxORherisMEyCfvTH87C6G8ow/view) and [dean](https://drive.google.com/file/d/145ZjBF5ACfjK9x__3Yu8Tg1Dl5GPPW_1/view) from a maker.


	3. PSALMS.

It’s morning. Dean and Sam are driving; Sam, riding shotgun, has a wide map spread open on her lap. “Two more towns,” she grits out, her jaw clenched hard and her eyes still red. She’s a human person grieving. She hasn’t showered or brushed her hair or teeth since they’ve left the Roadhouse. Chapped lips, armpit stains creeping down her tank top, and sweat beaded along the top of her long forehead. There’s a balf-drunk beer in the cupholder beside her.“Once we leave Moab, it’s Branson, then Gatling, then Serendipity. We’ll be there in an hour tops.” A swig of beer, which she doesn’t enjoy. A glare.

Dean grunts an affirmation and accelerates, turning the dial on the radio until it plays Fly Away by Lenny Kravitz. 

Time passes. The siblings whiz by a “Now Leaving Moab, Utah! God’s Country. Come again soon!” sign. After a brief open stretch, they pass a sign of smaller dimensions, a bit battered, that reads “Welcome to Branson,” and Sam watches as the town springs up around them.

They drive by dog walkers, two elderly women, and a cluster of college kids home for a fall break. They’re casual friends, grouped in a loose circle and chatting. A streetlight above their head is flickering. At its base, unseen by the young adults (and Sam and Dean), is a seething cloud of black smoke. A demon.

We leave Sam and Dean to focus in on one of the college kids, who watches the Impala go past with definite interest; it’s not every day you see a metal beast like that. She’s dressed modestly in a turtleneck and jumper, and she’s easily the most conventionally attractive of the group. Tanned skin, blue eyes, and gold-blonde hair in bangs and soft waves that land just past her shoulders. If you’re like, ‘oh boy this is the type of woman something bad would happen to in Supernatural,’ you are absolutely right. She laughs at something her one of her friends (boyfriend?) says and hugs him sideways, leaning her head gently against the side of his neck.

CUT.

It’s maybe 45 minutes later, and the sun has progressed in the sky. We’re still with this young woman. The only college kids still there are the girl and, yes, her boyfriend. She’s laughing, swatting him softly on the chest, telling him he doesn’t have to walk her home. He wants to. She rolls her eyes, says it’s a safe neighbourhood—she’s got a pocket knife and pepper spray just in case, “And come on, I’ve taken two years of self-defence, Josh. I could deck _you_. Besides, I like evening walks. It’s nice, you know. Take some time alone, reflect on things. It’s private. Peaceful.”

“Alright,” Josh says, smiling. He hugs her, kisses her on the forehead. “G'night. Text me when you get home.”

“You too.” She strokes his cheek. “G’night, Josh.”

They separate. We follow the girl, whose name we still don’t know. Are you like ‘who the fuck is she and why is she significant?’ If so, congratulations. You should be.

As she’s passing by a neighbour’s house, humming idly, something surges out of the storm drain beneath her feet.

Black smoke.

It aims right for the girl, forces itself down her throat as she screams and thrashes. She tries to vomit, a fruitless effort to expel the invasion, and falls to the ground.

When she gets up her eyes are black. She—and it’s a different she; a demon now, not a girl—blinks them back to normal, smiles wickedly. Deftly - her mannerisms are sharp now, devious - she opens the girl’s clutch purse to rifle through it, lips pursed. “And who am I this time…” she murmurs, plucking out a mirror and then a Utah driver’s license. The demon examines her new face and reads the name of the victim she’s possessing, and repeats it out loud:

“Margaret Ruth Masters.”

She ponders the name for a moment, flicks the card between her fingers. “Meg.”

SUPERNATURAL TITLE CARD. THEME SONG, “SEPTEMBER” BY EARTH WIND AND FIRE. A JAZZY MONTAGE OF MARY WINCHESTER DYING ON THE 21ST NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER.

We follow Meg as she pivots and strides back into town. In a short series of scenes we see make herself over with cosmetics shoplifted from a family business. She barges into a hair salon and uses money from the girl’s wallet, chopping off all her wavy hair in favor of bleached slide-cut bangs. She gets her nose pierced at a tattoo parlour. These scenes are quick, fast, pointed. One store over, she buys new clothes, replacing Margaret’s jumper with comfortable pants and a red leather jacket. She examines herself in the mirror, turning side to side, satisfied. Margaret, whoever she was, has been erased.

“Ma’am?” comes the voice of a sales clerk. A young woman closing up the clothing store. “Sorry to bother you. Um, we’re closing.”

“Oh, I’ll just be a moment,” Meg says hurriedly. “Um, there’s a bit of a mess in aisle six.”

The employee looks tired. “Really?” She turns toward aisle six, right behind her. As soon as she turns away, Meg jumps her, wraps both arms around her waist before slitting her throat with Margaret’s pocketknife. The woman staggers, sinks to her knees, air leaving her lungs in a dying gurgle. Meg rolls her eyes, collects the spilling blood in her hands, and murmurs an ornate Hebrew incantation. It ends with עֲזָאזֵל.

The blood burbles, swirls unnaturally, produces ripples and textures that establish a connection between Meg and the entity she’s contacting. The saleswoman is still fainty alive, blood spilling out of the gash in her neck as Meg converses with the spirit. “We don’t have much time,” Meg says, eyeing the bloodflow. “The Winchesters are in Utah, headed East toward Serendipity. They are separated from their father.” The being replies something we can’t hear. Meg nods solemnly, her eyes blinking black. “I will.”

The woman twitches once and dies. As her lifeforce drains, the summoned being in the blood dissolves, the connection severed. With a sigh, Meg lets the blood fall. She wipes her hands on the dead woman’s clothing, and saunters out of the store. The woman’s messy corpse is in aisle six.

CUT.

Sam, in the car nex to Dean. She is digging her fingernails hard into the palm of her hand. Flashbacks to Jake on the ceiling, burning, Sam in the most rending agony she has ever felt. Jake comes up close to her, corpse smouldering, and then suddenly it isn’t Jake, it’s a pale nervous young man with wide, frightened eyes. There is a gun rotating slowly, suspended in the air in front of him.

Sam yelps and snaps out of it, breathing hard. “Sam?” Dean asks, a hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Sam says, panting. “Yeah—do we—do we know someone named, um, Max Miller?”

“Uh… I don’t think so?”

Sam looks down and swallows. “Okay.”

“Why?”

“I just—” she bites her lip. “Nevermind.”

Dean shrugs. They cross the “Welcome to Serendipity” sign and pull up to a roadside motel. CUT.

“Hey,” calls Dean, swaggering up to the receptionist, a pretty woman with straight black hair. “One room, two beds.”

“Name?” she asks boredly.

“Hector Aframain.” He slides her the fake credit card.

“You guys having a reunion or something?”

“What do you mean?” Sam asks.

The receptionist pops bubble gum. “I had another guy. Burt Aframian. He came and bought out a room for the whole month.”

“Yeah,” says Dean quickly, knowing it must be John. “We’re—we’re with him.”

“Has he been by?” Sam cuts in.

The receptionist shakes her head. The siblings exchange a worried glance. “He’s our dad,” Sam clarifies. “What, uh, what room did he stay in?”

CUT. We’re in John’s hotel room. The Winchesters look around. Every vertical surface has papers pinned to it: a large map, newspaper clippings, pictures, notes. There are books on the desk and assorted junk on the floor and bed. There’s a line of salt on the other side of the door that Sam and Dean carefully step over.

“Whoa,” Sam mutters.

Dean turns on a light by the bed and picks up a half-eaten hamburger sitting there. Dean sniffs it and winces; it’s gone bad. “I don't think he's been here for a couple days at least,” Dean remarks. He eats the burger anyway while Sam watches in shock. “ _Dude_.”

“What?”

Sam shakes her head and turns back to the papers. There are red threads connecting people across the US. She looks closely at one picture labelled Lily Baker. The ground shifts.

Sam is _there_. Lily at a funeral, breaking down by the coffin, sobbing, screaming, inconsolable. A man puts a comforting (and restraining) hand on her shoulder. Seconds later, he begins to choke, doubling over. Lily stares at him, gasping. He topples to the ground. Lily breaks away like a spooked horse. As she sprints down the aisle of the church toward the exit, her shoulder brushes with another man’s. At the brief moment of physical contact, he presses a hand to his chest; a heart attack.

The vision ends. Sam staggers back from the map and sprawls on the floor. In seconds, Dean is kneeling over her. “Dude, are you okay?”

Sam blinks hard, shoves Dean aside, surges back to the map. Stares at the face connected to Lily’s, labeled Andrew Gallagher.

It happens again. A hospital, a nurse informing a young Andrew that his brother has died. Andrew in the bathroom screaming into a mirror, face red and throat scraped raw. But this time, instead of continuing the scene, time shifts. Andrew is older, high school age now, taking the SAT. He keeps thinking of his brother. He looks down. His desk has raised itself off the floor. He panics, flails, and a pencil flies across the room and embeds itself in the blackboard.

The image disappears and Sam reels back.

“Sam, what is it?” Dean is hovering at her shoulder, concerned.

Sam whirls on him. “Something weird.”

“What?”

Sam shakes her head, her breath accelerated, and practically slams her body against the map. The third picture, labelled Max Miller, is the anxious man she saw in her mind earlier in the day. 

“Something _very_ weird.” There’s a slow smile, one she’s not conscious of, creeping over her face.

Dean follows Sam’s gaze.

“Max Miller,” he says.

“Max Miller,” Sam echoes, swallowing an absurd burst of giddiness.

“Didn’t you—”

“Yeah.”

“In the car. Two hours ago. You asked about him. And he’s, a picture of him, he's right here in Dad's room.”

“Yeah.” Sam’s voice is breathy, high.

“And you—you had no idea.”

“I’ve never seen him before in my life.” She turns to Dean. “You?”

Dean shakes his head. 

Sam pulls her phone out of her back pocket and snaps a picture of the entire map. “I need…” she says vaguely. 

“What?” Dean asks.

“I need to find these people.”

“Sam,” says Dean cautiously, “We need to find Dad.” He puts a hand to her forehead like a mother would. “Are you warm?”

Sam smacks his hand away. “Dean—”

“Sam, WHAT IS GOING ON.”

Sam flinches at the raised voice, and Dean quiets.

“Sam,” he repeats, “What’s going on.”

Sam inhales carefully. “In the car,” she says slowly, “I was thinking about Jake.” The name brings a lodge of crushed emotion in her throat. “I was thinking about watching Jake…” she gestures abortively. “Yeah. And then—Jake’s face changed, and it was this face, this guy,” she taps Max’s face, “And he had a gun floating in front of his face. And somehow, when I saw him, I knew his name.”

“Are you sure you’ve never met him?”

“I’m positive.” Sam snorts. “Dean, I can count the boys Dad’s allowed me to be friends with on one hand. I would’ve remembered this guy.”

“Okay. Sam, you know that’s weird, right?”

“Uh, yeah, that Dad never let me talk to people?”

“No! I’m talking about the literal psychic vision you just had?”

Sam still looks dazed. “Sure.”

“Okay.” Dean waves a hand in front of Sam’s face. “Earth to Samantha?”

Samantha blinks. “Yeah, Dad. Sure, Dad. I’m gonna… I’m gonna go… get water.” She wanders out of the motel room before Dean can stop her.

“Dude, there’s a sink right…” Dean gestures to the bathroom. He spins. “Wait, did you just call me Dad?”

Sam’s out of the room. Dean scoffs in disbelief, then marches over to the motel room’s safe to puzzle over the code. First he tries his dad’s birthday, then his mom’s, then the day they got married, then Sam’s birthday, then his own. At his own birthday, it opens.

“Huh,” Dean grunts. “He remembered after all.”

He opens the metal door and yanks out his dad’s military surplus canvas bag. It’s half-empty, John obviously having his hunting equipment out of it. He jerks the bag to the floor, spreads it out and kneels, fishing around in it for the secret pocket only John and he know about. He unzips it and turns it inside-out. There’s only one thing in the pocket: a notebook.

Dean out the notebook, flips to the dog-eared page. Only a few words are written on it, and almost none of them make sense. It’s a messy list, written in haste, partially in backwards pigpen code. Dean works on it for a few minutes, hunched over on the wood floor, and finally comes up with:

“Mjölnir, Amulet of Hesperus, Angel Tablet, Chrysomallos Fleece, etc. Πλοῦτος: PLOUTOS.”

Beneath it, underlined thrice, “COLT,” and the words “Psalm XXIII:4.”

“Okay,” Dean sighs, “What the fuck?” 

A quick Google Search reveals that Psalm XXIII:4 is Psalm 23, verse four: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” Dean speculates briefly on phallic double entendres for the “comfort” provided by someone’s “rod” or “staff” and snickers, then groans because Psalm 23 is the one literally everyone knows and it provides absolutely no context to whatever the hell “Chrysomarshmallow” or whatever is, let alone Πλοῦτος. Dean rubs a hand through his hair. His knees hurt and he’s reading from the fucking _Bible_ _._ Sheesh Lou-weesh.

Swallowing his pride, he checks Psalms 22 and 24, just in case John fucked up the Roman numerals. Psalm 22 is a _real_ joy: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer—by night, but I find no rest.”

“10/10 pep talk for King Dave,” Dean mutters.

Psalm 24, as it happens, is just a platitude: “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it on the seas and established it on the waters. Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? The one who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not trust in an idol or swear by a false god.” Dean’s already yawning. Swearing by false gods are, like, his weekend plans. That and having sex with women. Swearing by false gods _while_ having sex with women. Yee-fucking-haw. Emphasis on the “fucking.”

A scream jars him from his thoughts. Every neuron in his brain: SAM. He bursts out of the motel room, scattering the salt, and skids down the hall, winds breathless at the front desk where a young woman is purchasing a motel room from the receptionist. He looks from side to side, panicked, then sprints out the door to find Sam cowering next to the motel’s front entrance, covering her ears and shaking.

The young woman purchasing a room turns to look briefly at Sam and Dean. It’s Meg.

She smiles and strides off toward the motel room door Dean left open. She deftly crosses the salt line Dean scattered, glares at the map, makes her way over to John’s hunting bag and examines the note written there.

Her eyes narrow and flicker black.

CUT.

Meg is kneeling over another shaking dying body in a dirty alleyway elsewhere in the city, cupping the victim’s lifeblood blood in her hands, establishing contact with the same entity as before. The juxtaposition - a demon whispering into blood soaked hands kneeling on a narrow concrete strip between apartment buildings littered with big mac wrappers, cigarettes, used condoms, empty vapes.

“They have some of the names. And they’re looking for the Colt,” she hisses.

The blood boils and seethes. Before it can reply, the body next to Meg spasms and dies, and the connection made by the blood is severed. Meg spits and gets to her feet. She turns to the corpse next to her, pulls the man’s car keys and wallet from his pocket. She steps out of the alleyway, unlocks his car—a silver truck—and climbs inside.

CUT.

Dean, pumped on adrenaline, is chucking Sam over his shoulder, sprinting to the motel room, tossing her down on the bed with such force she actually _bounces_. “Sam!” Dean is repeating. “Sam, Sam!”

Blearily, Sam blinks the last traces of a vision away. It’s two more people, and the names come with faces: James Talley, Rosie Holt. James is lifting a car off a curb, then staring at his forearms, astonished at his strength. Rosie is in the middle of a movie theatre, and when the woman next to her won’t stop crunching popcorn, Rosie flicks a finger and the popcorn bag bursts into flames. 

The faces and scenes swim away until it’s just Dean, shaking Sam on the bed, slapping her wrist, hissing at her to “Snap out of it,” not sure how to provide anything gentle.

“Dean,” Sam moves weakly, pushes him off. “I’m fine. Dean, I’m fine.” She stares at the map. Sure enough, there are two more names and faces connected to the red thread: James Talley and Rosie Holt.

Dean stops leaning over Sam and stands up, stretching until his back pops. “What the hell just happened, Sammy?”

Sam fists her hands and crams them into her eyes. “I guess,” she replies weakly, “A vision.”

“A what?!”

Sam curls in on herself. Her head is pounding, but it isn’t a bad pain. There's something that feels _good_ about it. Something clearing.

“Sam,” Dean says carefully. “Do you know who you are?”

“No need to give me a concussion test,” Sam snaps. “Samantha Moses Winchester, 22 years old and _irate_.” Already, she’s craving something, something inarticulable, and she thinks with a blinding pang of Jake.

She groans. Claws herself. She’s sweaty, reeking, mourning. She doesn’t want to be conscious, so she does what she always does. 

She murmurs something to herself, softly. Psalm 86 which she memorised long ago to be a source of comfort for her. “Hear me, Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy. Guard my life, for I am faithful to you; save your servant who trusts in you. You are my God; I put my trust in you. You, Lord, are forgiving and good, abounding in love to all who call to you. I call to you because you answer me.”

Dean wonders if Sam has at last completely and magnificently gone off her rocker. “Um?”

“I’m praying, Dean,” Sam snaps bitchily, and it’s so unabashedly _Sam_ that Dean laughs in a great unexpected bubble of joy because that’s his little _sister_ god dammit, and he loves her so much he’d punch mountains.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” he says with a gust of relief.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t get too excited.” Sam scrubs a hand down her face, lifting her armpit in doing so. “Jesus Christ on a dinosaur-shaped fishstick, I need a shower and a _half._ ”

“Cool,” says Dean. “And—yeah. But first can you do some research for me?”

“Dude, do it yourself,” Sam snaps reflexively. Then, with a hint of excitement, "Wait, research?"

Dean hands her the notebook, translates the code for her out loud. “Can you make sense of this? Colt, I figure… must be Samuel, right? Gunmaker? But why the Psalm, and like…” he points at Ploutos, “The planet? If it’s even still a planet. Hehe, nerd.”

Sam squints at the writing. “This,” she indicates Πλοῦτος, “Is Greek. Um… it says Ploutos, this, here, who I think is a god of wealth. That would _maybe_ explain the Chrysomallos Fleece, which is the Golden Fleece Jason and the Argonauts set out for—”

“Like in Percy Jackson?”

Sam stares at him. “Sure,” she says limply, suppressing a grin.

“What?” Dean asks. “I read.”

“Middle school books, apparently.”

“Says the bitch who reads the Bible.”

Sam grumbles something about ‘literature.’ Then, “It also might explain the Amulet of the Hesperus; might have something to do with the Hesperides. These are all - these are all mythical treasures, or weapons, Dean, I think. And maybe Ploutos, god of wealth, has them.”

“Right,” says Dean. “Here’s the catch. Um, Ploutos isn’t _real_.”

“Neither are we,” Sam points out. 

“Huh?”

“Sorry, broke the fourth wall for a second there.”

Dean’s not sure what to make of that. “Grab some duck tape and patch it back together, babey. Besides, you don’t have to be _real_ to be a... _real_ badass bitch.” (He makes the buh-dump-tsch sound.)

“It’s _duct_ tape, dumbass.”

“Aaaaand what about it.”

Sam exhales a bit of laughter, but it fades fast. “Dean,” she repeats, suddenly urgent, “I gotta find—”

“Yeah. Dad. We gotta find Dad.”

Sam swings her legs off the bed. “No.”

Dean blinks. That’s not a word he’s used to hearing. “No… what?”

“No,” Sam says calmly, almost glacial. “I have to find—the people I’ve been seeing. The people on the map.”

“Why?”

“I just _know_ I have to,” she replies, as if that makes any sense.

Dean gives her a funny look and speaks slowly, deliberately, _commandingly_ , a great force humming beneath the words. “Sam, we gotta find our missing father who could literally be dying as we speak.”

He’s concerned, and concern warps toward anger, and it hits like a tingling up his chest. Mixed emotions are not emotions he can ever be comfortable with. “Sam?”

His sister doesn’t look quite—for lack of a better word—all there. “Dean…” Stepping lightly, oddly, she gravitates back toward the map, poking idly at the names. “There should be more,” she murmurs, fingers light across the paper. The pads of her fingers reach other locations and settle there as if fixing the places into her mind. “Many more.”

“Sam.” Dean grabs her by the elbow, pulls her away, but she turns right back as if magnetised. “Sam, Ploutos. Thor’s hammer thingie. Golden fleece. Samuel Colt—” He remembers something. “Sam.” _Shit, shit, shit._ “Did you take your, uh, crazy pills?”

Sam doesn’t spare him a glance. “Are you implying I’ve gone crazy?” The question is calm. This is weird. Dean can feel his heart rate accelerate, feel the weight of his body shift as if preparing to chase something. “Because I am thinking lucidly. The pills are for obsessions and compulsions. This is not one.” She pauses with a shred of mirth. “Not that kind, anyway.”

Dean backs away, finds Sam’s packed suitcase and digs until he finds her toiletry bag, staring back at Sam who continues to trace entranced fingers across the map.

Finally, he comes up with the bottle of pills. “Here,” he says gruffly, crossing to Sam and shoving them into her hand.

She reaches into the container, plucks out a pill and swallows it dry, jerking her head like a bird. “Thank you.”

Dean hovers around Sam, feeling about as useful as Roomba in a spotless rich-person kitchen and about as skilled as JJ Abrams rebooting a beloved sci-fi franchise. 

“Sam. We gotta find Dad.” Sam may be a bit of a nut right now she’s healthy and unwounded—it’s Dad he has to worry about. “Sam.” He snaps a finger in front of her face. “Dad.”

No reply. Sam must be having a ‘vision’ again. “SAM!”

She blinks back. 

“You okay?”

“Fine. I’m….” she bites her lip, then exhales in a rush. “Hungry?”

“Sure,” says Dean. That, he can take care of. That he can _do._ “Yeah, sure. I—you can,” he flaps a hand, “Go shower. Get some rest. I’ll grab—are burgers okay?”

Sam should object, should instead request a salad, should roll her eyes at Dean and launch into a spiel about the benefits of “kale,” whatever that is. Dean braces for it.

Instead, Sam just nods. 

“Okay,” says Dean. “Okay. Okay, um, you’re gonna be all right while I’m out?” He curses internally for the stupid question. Sam’s 22 years old, for god’s sake.

“Don’t infantilize me,” says Sam with a hint of bite.

“Right.”

Dean turns, takes John’s notebook in his hand, rifles through his wallet to ensure he’s got enough cash, and leaves, a last look at his sister. He resets the salt line and carefully locks the door.

CUT.

Sam is naked in the shower but we only see, like, an elbow because fuck the male gaze. She’s put a clean but sodden towel over the dirty shower floor and is sitting down on it, letting the water fall over the back of her neck, straightening and weighing flat the waves and curls of her hair. Rubbing her eyes. She’s cold. She looks at the knobs that control the water temperature and tilts her head. Slowly, it turns.

Her eyes widen in surprise. She tries again, and, without touching the knob, turns the water off. Then on again. Then off.

CUT.

She’s out of the shower, dressed in a clean T-shirt, zipped sweatshirt and jeans, with towel-dried damp hair, typing at her laptop. Occasionally, she’ll mutter a word. “Ploutos.” “Fleece.” After a bit, she stands up, noses around John’s left-behind items, ultimately arrives back at the map. Pokes the picture of Max Miller with the tip of her finger.

Out springs a more detailed vision of him. He’s younger, in his early teens, and his father is striking him violently across the face, teeth gritted as if he’s doing something heroic, something manly, instead of something depraved. Max screams and closes his eyes, flinging an arm up over his face, and his father’s hand descends for another blow, his neck snaps. Young Max opens his eyes, trembling. Sees his father’s still body on the floor. Slowly, he realises he’s safe.

Sam blinks the vision away. With deliberate movements, she takes the red string and all the pictures tacked to the map away. Rolls up the map. Begins to pack her things together.

CUT.

Outside, rolling a suitcase by her side and shouldering a backpack, she dumps the map in a nearby ditch and drops a match on it, staying to make certain it’s burnt entirely to ash before stamping the remnants of the fire into mud. She has a near-photographic memory, and besides, she has the picture of it on her phone. Dean doesn’t.

“Max Miller,” she murmurs. He’s the closest one to where she is. She knows where his face was on the map, and even if she didn’t, she knows. Somehow, bone-deep, she knows. Rock Springs, Wyoming.

CUT.

We’re with Dean, fidgeting in the front seat of the Impala as he idles in a drive-through, clicking a pen against his lips, waiting for his food. At the window he orders a burger for himself, a burger for Sam, a milkshake, fries, and a side salad, no dressing, also for Sam. He eats all the fries on his way back - he’s only human. And because he’s only human, he considers taking a break: before heading back to the motel, just driving out perpendicular to the main road until he finds a patch of green, a one-bench park off the beaten path, an anomaly among the concrete and lights and asphalt and grease and advertisement-signposts of America, a place where he can imagine fresh air, just to breathe. These are the places where he’s spent the few peaceful parts of his childhood, after all.

He doesn’t. He swings the car back on the freeway, gunning the engine with more force than necessary.

CUT.

No sign of his earlier deliberation visible, Dean swings the door to the motel room open, smile on his face and food in his hands, calling out that he’d, “Rushed home to keep the burger warm for ya, Sammy.” He stops, looks around. “Sam?”

No broken windows, no sign of a break-in, but no Sam anywhere. “Sam?” A note of panic in his voice. He checks the salt line, sees that it’s fine. The map is gone, though. “Sammy?!”

His eye falls on the table next to John’s bed. A scrap of paper.

_Dean -_

_Nothing bad happened, I promise. I’ve gone to find Max. Took the map with me. Did the research you asked; nothing new. Ploutos is god of wealth. All items on the list are mythical - Mjölnir is Thor’s hammer, etc. Could possibly be used in hunts - if it were real, of course. Can’t make sense of the reference to Psalm 24. “Colt” could refer to the man or the gun (or a horse), but I figure you knew that already. My guess is it’s the gun. Maybe Dad’s looking for it. Thought about why - maybe it can kill the demon that killed Mom._

_I know that’s a lot of maybes. Sorry to leave while you were out. I left you some money so you can lay off the credit card scamming for a while._

_Enjoy your burger!_

_Sam._

Dean reads it. Rereads it. Draws a hand over the stubble on his chin and reads it again. Holds it up to the light. Motel notepad, shitty pen. It’s Sam’s handwriting, and the way it’s written just _sounds_ like Sam.

CUT.

We’re with Sam again. She’s standing on the side of a highway, a couple miles away from the motel. She’s got a slender pistol concealed in her right hand; her left is out thumb-first. Hitchhiking. 

Car after car passes her by. She gets two catcallers. 

She sits down heavily on her suitcase. Sits hunched over, silhouetted by the blue afternoon sky, empty Americana road in front of her and then dust and crags and red dirt stretching to a far horizon. One anonymous roadside speck, less than insignificant. Dwarfed, swallowed by massive ancient landscape. A tiny thing.

CUT.

Back at the motel room, Dean slams down Sam's note, picks up the $50 stacked beneath it, and calls her. 

He’s sent straight to her chipper, annoying voicemail.

“Hey there. You have reached Samantha Winchester, who is currently unavailable but will reply to your message at her earliest opportunity, unless you’re a telemarketer, in which case go to hell. Kisses!”

Dean has to smile at that. “Kisses,” that’s the sort of thing he would do, but with a particularly Sammish twist. She learnt a lot from him, he thinks with something like a glow. Then it vanishes.

“Sam,” he practically growls into the phone, “What were you THINKING?! Call me. Call me _as soon as you possibly can._ ”

He hangs up, his thumb vicious on the button. Calls back again five minutes later; straight to voicemail again.

“Sam, you asshole, tell me where the fuck you are. Sam, you could have been _got_. You could’ve been—Sam, first dad, now you, I mean, what?”

He didn’t mean to let that last part slip out and grinds his teeth, coming up with an idea. “I even bought a salad for you, dammit. You owe me,” he checks the receipt, “Two dollars and sixty five cents. Pay up.”

CUT.

Sam sees a car coming, halfheartedly sticks her thumb out without getting up. She’s just showered but the highway’s passing vehicles have coated her with dust again. To her surprise, the car—a silver truck—slows down. She reaches for her gun with one hand.

The car comes to a jerky halt. The passenger door opens, revealing a smiling Meg. When Sam sees it’s a woman, she relaxes with palpable relief.

“Hey,” Meg calls, giving a small wave. “I’m Meg. You headin’ northwest?”

Sam nods gratefully, sticking her gun back into her pocket and reaching for her wallet instead. “I can pay you for the ride—”

Meg waves her offer off. “It’s no worries.”

“You’re sure?”

“Eh, chip in for gas, maybe? But between you and me, I’ve been alone on this road for hours. ’S’long as you’re not a creep,” she shrugs her borrowed body’s shoulders, “I’d enjoy the company.”

Sam's face achieves something approximating a smile, and it feels so good she could cry. “I’m not a creep, I promise.”

Sam’s phone is vibrates loudly. Meg indicates it. “Who’s that?”

“My brother,” Sam says without checking. “I’m—going to meet him. In Wyoming.”

Meg tilts her head. Of course, we know that she knows this isn’t true; she saw Dean at the motel. Sam’s lie pleases her. “Alrighty. Hop on in, girl.”

“Samantha. You must be very trusting,” Sam exhales with a small laugh as she clambers in, inexpertly hiding the gun.

“I know self-defence,” Meg counters. 

“Yeah. World like this, you gotta.”

“Don’t I know it, Samantha.”

They drive in silence for a bit, Meg edging out the speed limit but about 7-10mph. Eventually, she turns to Sam. “You all right there? Still nervous of stranger danger 'n all that?”

“I mean, I _was_ hitchhiking,” Sam replies with the hint of a smile.

“Act of desperation, or…?”

Sam doesn’t reply. Meg, who we can tell by now is a damn good actor, puts a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Hey. I’ve heard car conversations can be good for ya. What’s going on?”

A pause. Sam’s face crunches up tight.

“My boyfriend died,” she admits, her voice small. “My boyfriend died, and I—”

“Shit, dude.” Meg pretends to be utterly gobsmacked. “Do you want to—jeez, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. You wanna… um, you wanna talk about it?”

Sam sniffs. She’s staring out the window, her view blurred with tears. “He baked me my first birthday cake,” she says finally. “It's weird that that's all I can think of right now. Not our first meeting, not our—last—meeting, but... the cake. What it meant to me, I guess." She pauses, but she's unlatched the floodgates now, and everything comes spilling out. "I’d never had a proper birthday party before, and he made a cake. For me. I mean, I had had a storebought cake, or half of one, once. But he baked a cake—just for me. Yellow cake, which he didn’t even _like_ , but _I_ did, and he knew I did. And—twenty two candles, in purple. My favourite color. Nobody had ever-" She sniffs. "And he’d play cards with me, and didn’t laugh at me for the fact that I only knew how to play poker and blackjack—my big brother taught me. But with Jake I played Clue, I played Sorry, Monopoly and Cards Against Humanity with friends, and I watched cartoons, and…” Her breath is tight in her chest. “He was like—I didn’t have a normal childhood, you know? Latchkey kid doesn't even begin to cover it. I was always moving. No, like, sofa where I curl up on to watch Spongebob Squarepants on Saturdays. My entertainment was the inside of my brain, you know? No library card, no Netflix, no family dinners, really. No mom,” she reflects with a rueful smile. “And I guess—Jake knew, somehow, that I’d missed out on a lot, growing up. Even though I never told him what it was like, he just… He knew. He knew what I’d lacked, and he gave that to me. And he was my best thing. He was my very best thing and—he’s dead.” She leans her head against the window. “He’s dead.”

Meg’s face is plastered with utmost compassion. She reaches her hand out again, strokes it down Sam’s arm, watches as Sam, touch-starved by now, leans into the comforting contact.

“I’m sorry,” Meg says, not fighting to hide her victorious smile now that Sam’s eyes are closed and tear-crusted. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

Sam reaches up and covers Meg’s hand with her own. “Thank you.” Another sob crawls its way out of her throat. Wordlessly, Meg hands her water. Sam gulps it gratefully.

“You don’t even know me,” She chokes out, snot down her face. “You don’t even know me, but you’re being kinder to me than—” She scrubs her hands down her face. “I feel like I’ve lost my mind, Meg.”

“Hey, hey. It’s okay, Samantha. You’re gonna be okay.” Meg pats Sam’s shoulder one more time, then grimaces and wipes her hand down her pant leg the second Sam looks down at her phone. Sam pulls earbuds out of her bag, plugs them in, listens to Dean’s two voicemails. She types a text to him, then turns off her phone completely, letting her heavy head thunk back against the window.

CUT.

Dean, pacing the motel room, stops abruptly when he gets a text from Sam.

“I owe you two dollars and sixty five cents? Excuse you. I left you fifty bucks, jerk.”

Dean nods, satisfied, then dials the Roadhouse. 

“Hey Ash? Can you run a trace on a text?”

CUT.

“She's headed toward Wyoming,” Dean repeats. “You’re sure?”

Ash’s irked voice: “Of course I’m sure.”

“Okay.”

“Anything on the ding-dong-demon-device?”

“Ding-dong-demon-device?”

“Yeah, that’s what I called it.”

Dean blinks. “Okay… cool. Um, no. Radio silence on that front. Ellen get anything else from Dad?”

“No.” He mimics Dean’s voice, but, like, three octaves higher. “Radio silence on that front.”

“Aw, fuck you, man.”

Ash sighs long-sufferingly. “If you like.”

Dean’s heart drops into his shoes. “Dude, I didn’t mean—”

Ash bursts into a raucous guffaw, and worse, Dean can hear Jo laughing along behind him. 

“You are _so easy_ to mess with,” Ash realises aloud.

“He's easy too,” Jo mutters mischievously, just loud enough for Dean to hear. 

“Why?” Dean asks. “You offerin’ somethin'?” He waggles his eyebrows before remembering Jo can’t see.

“Shut up,” Jo says amiably. “Anything new on the search for John?”

“Yeah, actually.” Dean ruffles through John’s papers. “We found one of his motel rooms, got some new shit. Um, 'Mjölnir, M-J-O-L-N-I-R, Amulet of Hesperus, H-E-S-P-E-R-U-S, Angel Tablet, Chrysomallos, C-H-R-Y-S-O-M-A-L-L-O-S, Fleece, etc.' Then this Greek word that means Ploutos, then the English word Ploutos, then in all caps C-O-L-T Colt, and Psalm X X I I I colon four, which means Psalm 23 verse four.”

Scratching of a pen over the phone as Jo copies out Dean’s info. “Got it.” She reads it back to him, and he confirms it with one small correction. “Uh, Mjölnir has those two dot-things over the O.”

“I know,” Jo huffs, amused.

“Well.” Dean doesn’t really know what to say. “Uh, great. Thanks.”

His finger hovers over the end-call button when Jo says, “Don't hang up, buttface. How’s Sam?”

Dean ends the call.

CUT. 

We see a shot of Sam from outside Meg’s truck. Her dusty face is tracked through with tearstains. It’s gentled by rest, lulled by the motion of the car, calmed by the fact that she feels comfortable with Meg. Meg is a woman her age, a compassionate person who’s clearly lived for a while in her car. She’s an equal, a peer. Sam can relax here.

Of course, Meg isn’t Sam’s age. She isn’t compassionate. She isn’t even a person. She’s a god-knows-how-old demon who slits throats for sport, and almost every word she’s said to Sam has been a lie. She didn’t just _happen_ to find her on the road, and the truck was stolen from a man she murdered. Sam's tiny bit of relief is artificial.

Meg revels in the trust Sam gives her, a slow smile creeping over her face, and accelerates toward Wyoming.

We focus in for one more shot on Sam as she breathes slowly, grief and confusion etched in every line of her face. She does what she always does when she feels this way: she prays. This time, it's a segment from Psalm 18.

“He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters. He rescued me from my powerful enemy, from my foes, who were too strong for me. They confronted me in the day of my disaster, but the Lord was my support. He brought me out into a spacious place."

We see the 'spacious place,' the wide landscape of America.

Sam's eyes flicker shut. She presses her hands over her ears as if to quiet her thoughts.

END CREDITS MUSIC: Lost in my Mind by The Head & The Heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I mean. hope you like it?? [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_19LOhsbKuuURVoRGuoC--ZawZstQUJq/view?usp=sharing) is a picture of Margaret and Meg.  
> Feedback is SUPER welcome. How often would you like this to update? Would you want to keep tabs on it or subscribe or something?


	4. HABAKKUK.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “'Monster' derives from the Latin monstrum, itself derived ultimately from the verb moneo ('to remind, warn, instruct, or foretell'), and denotes anything 'strange or singular, contrary to the usual course of nature, by which the gods give notice of evil,' 'a strange, unnatural, hideous person, animal, or thing,' or any 'monstrous or unusual thing, circumstance, or adventure….”

We open up on Dean in the Impala. He’s hours behind Sam, but he wants to find her. As he cruises (speeding) through a small city, he realises he recognises it. His foot eases up on the accelerator.

We see a brief flashback. A younger Dean, hand in hand with a young Black woman, Cassie Robinson. As our Dean drives, staring out the windshield, he sees the spectres of his past self and his one-month girlfriend walking down the sidewalk. He passes an ice-cream shop they visited, remembers sitting at one of the outdoor tables.

He blinks the memories away.

CUT.

He pulls up to a gas station, listening to Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones. Briefly, he takes out his phone, pulls up CASSIE ROBINSON. He almost types a text to her: “Hey, Cassie. Just passing through. Thinking of you.” He adds a winky face to the text. Then deletes it. Then deletes the entire text. 

He pockets his phone, goes to fuel the car. He moves swiftly; he’s a strong stark person, and though we know him fairly well by now, it’s surprising how easily he blends into the dirt and poverty of the rural gas station, the ‘normal’ people shopping in the convenience store. He uses the bathroom, comes out, and a man shoves into him hard, unexpected and rough. Dean’s head slams into the doorway and his lip splits. The man lands on top of him, angled so a bit of Dean’s blood splatters onto his face.

Without even thinking, Dean lands a right hook into the man’s face, a blow that will produce a massive bruise. Immediately, already apologising, the man is scrambling away, one hand up, the other massaging his eye. “Accident,” he’s pleading, bent over. He’s small, with a scruffy beard and limp arms and grey eyes; Dean rakes his eyes over him and tags him as thoroughly “not a threat.”

Dean draws a fist up to his lip, smears the blood away. “Watch it,” he growls, and shoulders past the man on his way out, purchasing an energy drink and shoplifting a candy bar.

The man turns, follows Dean with his eyes. He turns away from the restroom to purchase the same kind of candy bar, then strides back into the restroom again.

As soon as Dean’s out and back in the Impala, he examines the candy he’d nicked without looking at. “ _Hazelnut_ kit-kat?” he snaps to the wrapped piece of bullcrap in his hand. “Are you kidding?” He chucks it into the garbage can, muttering something about “Fuckin’ allergic,” and slides his phone into his hand to reread his conversation with Sam. There’s nothing new. He fires another text off to her. “You still all right?”

He waits, but it doesn’t deliver. He figures she’s got her phone off. Or she’s been murdered by a trucker. One or the other.

Dean grimaces. Grits his teeth. Calls his dad.

No answer. Dad’s other phone. No answer. Dad’s other-other and other-other-other phone. Same deal.

He shakes his head. Gets into the car and drives back out into the city. CUT.

As he drives, he thinks. We see other scenes of Dean and Cassie together. It wasn’t a perfect relationship. They would go to a bar together, Dean would flirt with other women, Cassie would glare at him, confront him later where he would deny it with a cocky grin. The day after they’d got ice-cream, they had sex; in the morning, Dean had left without saying goodbye, and two days later Cassie ran into him at a hardware store with a hickey she hadn’t given him. She went to a bar, only to find Dean leaving with one of the women he had flirted with earlier. Dean had seen her as he walked out with a hand drifting toward the woman’s ass. He could still picture her hurt face.

He gives a wry smirk to no-one in particular, turns the music louder, and drives on.

CUT.

Cassie Robinson, present-day, older and with longer hair than in the ice-cream flashback, answers a knock at her door. She’s in a pink t-shirt and has a small silver necklace around her neck.

It’s Dean.

“Hey, Cassie,” he says with a small smile.

Cassie slams the door in his face.

CUT.

OBLIGATORY SUPERNATURAL TITLE SEQUENCE. THEME SONG: “SEPTEMBER” BY EARTH WIND AND FIRE. JAZZY MONTAGE OF MARY WINCHESTER DYING.

We’re with Sam and Meg again. “Where to now?” Meg asks. They’re just inside the Rock Springs city limits. “You said you’re looking for your brother, right?”

Sam nods. “You can let me out. I can walk from here.”

Meg shakes her head. “And miss out on a couple extra minutes of your company?”

“Please don’t be flirting with me.”

“Oh, jeez, I’m not.” Meg throws up her hands. “Only dudes turn me on,” she says crassly. “Besides, I’m already com- _pletely_ committed.”

“Oh.”

“Is it so unbelievable that someone might just like you for being you and not because they want to screw ya?”

“Well, Jake.”

“You _never_ fucked him?!”

Sam blushes. “Meg!”

“Sorry, sorry!” She elbows Sam lightly. “At least I made ya laugh.”

Sam nods, a lopsided smile on her face.

“You’ve been through _hell_ , Samantha,” Meg continues, with a secret mirthful smile. “Let me at least drive you to wherever you’ve gotta go. You do know the address, right?”

Sam doesn’t. But she can sense, somehow, where Max Miller’s house is. “It’s… make a left in three blocks,” she says instead.

CUT.

“This it?” Meg asks, indicating a house. 

“A bit further down…” Sam is practically tingling with proximity. “There.”

“This one?”

“Yeah, the white siding and American flag.”

“Gotcha.”

Meg pulls to a halt, and Sam begins clambering out of her truck. “Thank you."

“Here,” Meg says, reaching for her phone, “Lemme give you my number. Call me if you need anything.”

“I’m—” Sam hesitates. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.”

Meg shrugs. “Okay, but it’s not like I’ll have _your_ number. You’ll just have mine, and you don’t have to use it. Can be a backup plan.” Her face softens. “I’m serious. I’ll be in the area, and I like helping people out.”

“You’re a good Samaritan,” Sam murmurs. Meg snickers, takes Sam’s phone from her offered hand, and types a number into it.

She and Sam shake hands. “Take care,” Meg says, with a parting wave, and drives off in a cloud of dust. 

CUT. Sam POV, watching Meg drive away. She shields her eyes from the sun, turns to Max Miller’s door. It says THE MILLERS in gold lettering on a mailbox. 

A gunshot from inside.

Sam races in the front door. Max is in the center of the living room, eyes wide and frightened, a gun in his hand. There’s a man cowering behind a couch; Max’s uncle. Max fires the gun again, but he flattens himself to the floor and the bullet embeds itself in the wall. 

“Max!” Sam shouts. “Stop it!”

Max turns to her. The color drains from his face, and the gun clatters to the floor. Following an instinct she doesn’t understand, Sam reaches for it. It goes flying across the room toward her and beans her straight in the chest.

She falls backward and Max gets ahold of it again, throwing a hand out, trying to draw the gun toward himself. Sam instinctively does the same, mirroring his gesture, jerking herself to her feet. The gun trembles in the air between them, victim of a sudden psychic tug-of-war. Max and Sam have identical levels of power. It goes nowhere, levitating in place. It’s the exact scene Sam saw in her vision; Max, the gun rotating in the air in front of his face. Sam didn’t know she could do that. It’s as natural as riding a bike.

The man raises himself from behind the couch. The family resemblance is clear. He lifts his phone to his hand to dial 911.

Max lunges for the gun, snaps it out of the air, and swings it toward his uncle, pulling the trigger and shooting him in the chest.

He falls. Sam screams. Max turns to Sam in a daze. 

“C-” Sam swallows, gives her hand for Max to take. “Come with me.”

Max clutches Sam’s hand and they sprint out the back door.

CUT.

Outside POV: Meg is parked down the street, binoculars fixed on the house. She sees Sam and Max bolt out of the house and down one of the side streets, then hops out of her truck and saunters into the Millers’ house. CUT.

Panting, Sam and Max race into an alley, and Sam helps Max clamber over the fence. They duck behind a dumpster. 

“Okay,” Sam pants, leaning over to catch her breath, “What the fuck was that?”

Max is staring at her. “I’ve dreamed about you,” he says.

Sam’s brain short-circuits. “Um? Yeah, that’s not weird at all.”

“I mean—I know you. You’re Sam. Samantha. Winchester.”

“Y—yeah. And you’re Max Miller.” Sam’s brain finally comes back online, and she gathers herself together. “Hang on. HANG ON. Why did you shoot your uncle?!”

Max looks down. His eyes are unfocused. He lifts one arm up as if in a halfhearted attempt to protect himself from something Sam can’t see.

The gesture is familiar to Sam. She’s made it.

“He was a demon,” murmurs Max. “He’s going to follow us.”

Sam’s eyes widen.

CUT.

We’re with Meg again, entering the Millers’ house and closing the door behind her. She crosses to Max’s uncle Peter, who is now sitting up despite the bullet hole in his chest, his eyes coal-black.

“C’mon,” Meg snorts. “Get your ass up.”

Peter cracks his arms and stands, stretching out. “So Samantha Winchester found Max.”

“Shit’s all goin’ as planned, knock on wood.” Meg taps the couch leg and cracks a smile. “All hail our lord ’n savior. Truly the Goat.” She laughs hard at this. “Come on, that’s funny. Goat? As in Greatest Of All Time, but also Goat as in… oh, nevermind.”

“Think he’ll survive her?”

Meg shrugs. “Wanna find out?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll need a new meatsuit,” Meg observes.

Peter groans. His jaw unhinges and black smoke pours out, shattering a window as it exits the house. The not-quite corpse falls backward, scattering sulfur, and Meg does what she’s done before; uses its blood to contact the entity until it dies. 

“Samantha Winchester has found Max Miller,” she informs it.

The blood boils; the entity, the “goat,” is pleased. After a moment, Peter dies.

Carefully, Meg cleans up the sulfur. No evidence of possession remains.

CUT. Back with Max and Sam in the alley.

“He was a demon,” Max insists dully. “Peter. My uncle. He was. His eyes, black.”

Sam is really starting to think this man is insane. Her voice drops to its lowest register. “How many other people have you killed?”

Max looks at her without really seeing her. He is a hollow person who _craves_ , and lately everything has been getting stronger, everything inside him except what he wants to be. He drops to his knees on the muck and garbage, puts his head on his hands. Sam kneels beside him. She doesn’t know if she should comfort him or run.

“He’s a demon,” Max repeats. “He’s a demon.”

“Oh...kay….” Sam purses her lips, sits down on the alley’s asphalt beside him a safe distance away. A puddle instantly soaks into the butt of her jeans. Fantastic. She talks to him like she would a preschooler. “How do you _know_ he’s a demon, Max?”

“I got the feeling,” Max reaches a hand up to his head, idly scrapes it through his hair. He trails his fingers down over his pale face, closes his teary eyes. “He kept wanting me to do things.” He looks up sharply, his eyes reddening at their corners. “I can do things.”

“Like…” Sam asks, but her heart is in her throat because she already knows, of course she knows.

“Like this.” Max twitches a finger and the entire dumpster behind him levitates before landing back on the ground with a crash. “I can do this. And so can you.”

“And?”

“And it feels good to,” Max says, his voice scraped dry. The next admission comes so quietly Sam can barely be certain she heard it. “It felt good. To… to snap my father’s neck.” 

“Did he hurt you?”

Max nods mutely. “And my mom.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was going to kill me. I was a kid. I panicked—”

“You defended yourself. I saw.”

“And after that… I could lift things. Change things. Move things without touching them. Somehow.”

“Telekinesis.”

“Mm-hmm.” A pause. “Uncle Peter found out. But he didn’t get mad. He… wanted me to. Keep doing those things.” Max’s voice drops to a whisper. “And his eyes were black in the mirror. I saw them once. He blinked and they were normal. But I saw.”

“Did he know you saw?”

Max shakes his head. 

“Did you tell anyone?”

Another head-shake. In some ways he’s more like a child than a man.

“Did Uncle Peter tell you anything about your… powers?”

Max nods but doesn’t elaborate.

“Max, please. This is important.”

“He said I was good. I was a fighter. A special child. There are others like me. Like us.”

“Lily Baker,” Sam starts.

“James Talley.”

“Rosie Hale.”

“And more.”

“And more.”

“We should find them.”

Max shakes his head. “No.”

“Why?”

“Uncle Peter said I should find them.”

“And…?”

“He’s a demon,” Max says bluntly. “If a demon wants me to do it, I won’t do it.”

“Demons are supernatural [heeeeeheee] creatures, Max. Monsters. Horns and stuff. As far as I know, they don’t… oh shit, they can _possess_ humans, can’t they? You think Peter was… not a demon, but, like, possessed by one?” It’s a horrible circumstance, certainly, but Sam is gleeful at how fast she put the pieces together.

Max nods.

“Alright. Let’s…” she pats Max awkwardly on the shoulder. “Let’s check on your uncle. See if there’s anything sus.”

“No.”

“Come on, Max. I’ll be with you the entire time.”

Hesitantly, Max nods.

CUT.

They sneak back toward the Millers’ house. Creep in the front door. Still no cops. Weird.

Peter is sprawled spread-eagle on the middle of the floor. Dead. Blood soaking into the carpet.

“He’s…” Max stares at him blankly. “Just… dead.”

“Somehow, if there are demons, I feel like there should be brimstone. _Sulfur_ ,” Sam corrects, poking the corpse with her toe, slightly out of it. “Dunno why.”

“You just know things, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Sam bites the inside of her lip slightly too hard, almost prompting blood. She comes back to herself, looks at the corpse with grief, with pity. “Somehow.”

“He’s not a demon anymore,” Max says, crouching next to the corpse. Like a marionette with its strings cut, he collapses on top of it.

“Max?”

Max’s shoulders hunch. He’s crying. The sort of crying abused children do: lurching, perfectly silent, contained bitten tongues and burning eyes.

“Max—”

Max flings a hand out to his side. Sam is flung against a wall. She struggles, but Max has had his powers longer; he’s stronger. He lifts her away from the wall, then slams her back into it, hard. Again. _Again._

Meg is peering in the window. Neither Max nor Sam sees her. She munches popcorn, watching Sam struggle against the force. Sam is kicking, pinned to the wall. Pinned to the—

_Jake._

The name crashes into Sam like a tidal wave. Adrenaline surges through her. She twists, thrusts, grunts, drops to the floor.

She springs to her feet, catlike, dives for the gun on the floor, cocks it at Max, who is turned toward her, eyes crazed. 

“Max,” she tries. Every neuron that indicates DANGER is firing at top speed. She raises one hand, refolds the other around the butt of the gun and aims it at Max’s foot, prepared to shoot-to-incapacitate. “Max, I don’t want to hurt you, but,” her learnt sense of justice kicks in, “I am going to call the police on you.” She cringes internally because she KNOWS acab, but like, she doesn’t know what else to do.

Max shakes his head wordlessly. He has gone vacant again. 

“Max?”

She can feel a force emanate from Max, can sense his telekinetic power stretching out toward her gun. She clenches it tighter.

She can feel Max try to take it from her hands, feel and practically _see_ him, or whatever operates behind his vacant stare, sending offshoots of power, like tendrils, like fingers, curling around the barrel, tugging gently. She tugs it back, teeth gritted, muscles she didn’t know she had surging to life in her arms-

Max’s telekinetic fingers move. They seek. They drift from the barrel, point it up. From Max’s foot to Max’s heart. “No-” Sam blurts, but his psychic fingers find the trigger.

Pull it.

A sound like a firework. The gun kicks back violently in Sam’s hand, sending her sprawling. She jerks herself to her feet, flings herself toward Max. He’s staring at the ceiling. His corpse is staring at the ceiling. It seems small. Bleached. _Young._

Dead. 

Bile rises in Sam’s throat. She slams a hand over her mouth and bolts for the door, twisting the knob, hurling it open, hurtling out into the street, a human comet, sprinting faster than she knew she could run. Fast, faster. Shoves the gun in her pocket. Shaking fingers unlock her phone as she dodges curbs and tree roots. _I’ll be in the area, and I like helping people out, Samantha._

She calls Meg.

Minutes later, a truck screeches around the corner. A faux-concerned Meg throws the door open, hauls a trembling Sam into the car. 

“How did you get here so fast?” Sam asks, bewildered.

“You left your suitcases in the trunk,” Meg says, grasping Sam and pulling her into a hug that she gratefully shudders into. “I was swinging back around to return them.”

“God,” Sam hisses out, clinging. “You’re an angel.”

“Mmm,” says Meg, and possessively strokes Sam’s hair.

CUT.

Cassie and Dean on the couch. 

“You came back,” Cassie is saying.

Dean nods. “We didn’t exactly part on good terms.”

Cassie snorts. “You held my hand and said you cared about me night after night until I _finally_ agreed to fuck you, and the very next night you ran off with Lucy and did the exact same thing with her. And Lucy told me you ran off and did the exact same thing with Nessa, so, you know.”

Dean blinks. “She told you?”

“We unionized. Anyway, real nice going, buster, because everyone knew what we’d done. They guessed, the _second_ you left with Lucy they guessed, they said ‘oh, you spread your legs like a whore and let that boy fuck you and he took off,’ and I really thought you’d come back, but you didn’t, and you would not believe the shit I took for it, Dean, you would _not_ believe it. School, church, and my parents think I’m a goddamn _slut_.” She shakes her head. “Fuck you. I mean it. Fuck you.”

“That’s not—”

“I’M NOT FINISHED!”

Dean gulps.

“The shit you told me. You hunt monsters.”

“Cassie—”

“And I _believed_ you. Christ, Dean! You came home—back to my house, you came back to my house splattered with blood and wounds and I genuinely believed that you were going out to, I don’t know, kick a shapeshifter’s ass, and you were just getting into Nora _and her sister’s_ pants. Like…” Cassie throws her hands up. “I’m actually glad you came back.” She smiles again. “I didn’t know how badly I wanted to just scream at you until I had you in front of me again. It’s been really cathartic, actually.” 

“Cassie…”

“What.”

“I really… I liked you.” Dean knots his fingers together.

“Oh, bull.”

“Cassie, I mean it. That’s why I left.”

This is basic, unimpressive shit. Cassie gives him a harsh no-bullshit smile. “Sure.”

“Cassie—”

Dean lifts up his sleeve. We see tattoos and, incorporated into them, three giant healed scars. “It was…” He scrambles for a lie. “Maybe not monsters, per se, but still hunts. Hunts my father pressured me to go on. Mountain lions and stuff.”

The scars are undeniably claw marks. Cassie stares at them, eyes wide. Dean pulls up his shirt (straight & bi women & mlm have fun) and reveals like, pretty decent abs (i can’t write this shit im a lesbian) with more scars across them. 

Cassie’s gaze lingers on his chest. She’s closer to him now, her tiny necklace dangling into their personal space. She finally drags her eyes up to him. “Your… father? Made you do this?”

“Yes. No. I mean—maybe?” Dean is uncomfortable, wants to change the subject. “I’m not usually this open and articulate about my feelings, am I?”

Cassie stares at him. “Uh. No.”

“I should change the subject.”

“Um. Maybe?”

“Here, want some chocolate?” He pulls out a hazelnut kit-kat from out of his pocket.

Cassie looks at it, then at him.

CUT. Cassie’s flashback. We see her perspective of the ice-cream date they went on. We see her and a younger Dean cross to the counter where she orders cheesecake flavour topped with hazelnuts and pecans, and Dean orders Ultra Triple Fudge. When they sit down to eat, Cassie offers Dean some of hers, and Dean refuses, explaining he’s allergic to hazelnuts.

Cassie takes the kit-kat hesitantly, breaks off a bit, hands the rest of it back to Dean. 

He smiles. Puts the bite in his mouth.

Cassie is tense. Dean misinterprets it. “Cassie, I—I mean it. If you want the truth of why I left you… being with you. Okay. So I was raised to be terrified of… things. Not, like, things, like…”

“Emotions,” Cassie supplies boredly. “Get a therapist. Work on your shit.”

“And—if I stayed with you, I would like you. Like, _really_ like you. And I couldn’t—because growing up like this, moving from town to town like this… the more you like someone, the more it hurts you when you leave, when you have to leave them.”

“The more it hurts _you_ ,” Cassie snaps. “You sure as hell didn’t even think about how it would hurt _me_.”

“I’m sorry.” 

Cassie tilts her head. “Are you?”

“I’m sorry, Cassie. I treated you badly.”

“Yes,” says Cassie. “And Nora, and Lucy, and Nessa.”

“And them.” Dean looks down. “I’m sorry, Cassie. I really am.”

Cassie nods and unhooks her necklace. Dean puts a hand on her knee. Slides it up.

Cassie leans into his touch. Dean shifts slightly, angles his head. 

Cassie tilts hers. 

Dean moves closer.

“Hang on,” says Cassie, shifting Dean around. “Lean back against me. Like that, yeah. Just for now.”

Dean rests his weight back against her, lets his head fall on her shoulder. Cassie takes the necklace, holds it taut in her hands. And in one swift movement, loops it around Dean’s throat.

Flesh hisses. “Dean,” who isn’t really Dean, howls. Twists. Cassie hangs on, digging the silver necklace into him. He twitches, finally collapses, his flesh steaming.

Cassie stares at the Dean-shaped monster on her floor.

CUT.

Cassie has tied him to her bedpost with, like, a combination of rope from her shed and what is probably bondage equipment. She calls Dean, the real Dean, on her phone.

CUT.

Dean’s in the car. And of _course_ this is the real Dean. The other one was just… off. Too honest, for one thing.

Dean blinks at the Caller ID, takes one hand off the steering wheel to answer it. He puts on a seductive voice, goes so far as to adjust his posture in the car seat. “Heeeeey, Cassie—”A long pause. “ _WHAT?_ ”

CUT.

Dean is in Cassie’s house, staring at the shapeshifter-him. He looks at Cassie with a sly expression. “Well if I’d known _that’s_ how you wanted me on your bed—”

Cassie punches him in the arm. “Not the time.”

Dean winks. “It’s always the time.”

Cassie resists the urge to punch him again. “You’re gonna,” she swallows, “Deal with that.” She indicates the shifter. “I’m gonna. What am I gonna do? I’m gonna mix a _stiff_ drink. Jesuschrist.”

“Can you make one for me?”

Cassie glares. “No.”

She spins on her heel and storms out.

Dean stares at the monster wearing his face.

He squats beside it, pulls out a knife, rolls up the creature’s sleeves. “You got my tattoos wrong,” he remarks offhand. “Scars’re all right, though.”

The shifter grins. Dean meets his own rogueish smile with a silver blade, pressing it against the creature’s lips until they blister.

It howls, thrashes against the ropes. 

“How’d you get me?” Dean asks.

“Three guesses.”

Dean thinks back. The man at the gas station, Dean’s blood—DNA—on his hand. 

“You’re a clever bastard, aren’t you?”

We see a flashback from the shifter’s POV. He hides in the bathroom to change, and it is a painful metamorphosis: skin peeling, blood and pus pouring, his bones cracking, his spine popping, twisting, breaking before straightening again. Mary by the Death Riders, tinny and half-inaudible, plays over the gas station speakers.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Dean says, harsh grit in his voice. “I hope it gave you hell, being me.”

“It did hurt,” the shifter admits, tilting its head. “At first I thought, side effect of the transformation, you know? Every bone in my body broken and remade. But it didn’t fade. And then I realised…” it shakes its head. “Nah. It ain’t just the transformation into you that hurts.” It taps its temple. “It’s you.”

Dean stabs it.

It laughs with Dean’s face. Tears spring to its eyes.

“At first I thought I hadn’t done it fully, because it wasn’t just your body I’d nabbed. It was your mind. Much more than I usually get from a brief brush, you know? _You_ climbed into me, coated my brain, thick and _guilty._ Desperate for someone to know you.”

Dean stabs it again, in its other shoulder. The shifter pushes on. “I know your loves, your hates, your kinks, even. I confused them with mine, at first. Thought I hadn’t shifted over right.” It licks its teeth. “My whole life, you know, born human but was different. Hideous and hated, until I learned to become someone else. Helps, you know? Usually, when I shift, I get someone else’s self-security layered on me, I get an _identity._ But from you?” it shrugs, sinewy. “I got squat. _You_ got squat, boy.” 

Dean cracks his knuckles. “Oh, I’m gonna have good fun killing you.”

“You are,” says the shifter pleasantly, dropping its Dean demeanor. “And you aren’t even gonna think about why.”

It lunges, snapping the ropes Cassie inexpertly tied on it, and tackles Dean to the floor. Dean rolls with it, wrestles it, but it anticipates his moves. It punches him. Kicks him. 

Distantly, Dean can hear Cassie approaching the door. “STAY OUT,” he hollers before the creature gets a hand on his mouth and shouts “CASSIE, HELP!” with Dean’s voice.

Adrenaline pumping, Dean shoves the creature off, shoves the center of the doorknob down; locks Cassie out of the room—locks himself in with the shifter.

He’s still got the knife. He lunges. Cassie pounds on the door.

The shifter dodges, sweeps his feet out with a kick. A punch. Another punch. Dean is losing. The creature has his skills, his strengths, but it hasn’t been sitting cramped in a car for hours.

Dean pants. Rolls, ducks, swings to his feet, slices the creature, a thin line across its—his—chest.

It hisses, leans back. Touches the blood, red-black, raises its eyes to Dean. “I’m bleeding,” it says in bewilderment. Its eyes narrow. “Is that enough?” he taunts. Dean can see the enjoyment in every line of its body. _His_ body. “Causing blood, you like that, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Dean snaps. He’s clenching his teeth so hard there’s blood between the molars. “I do.”

“Even if it’s your blood. Your blood, immigrant blood and hot red American blood, Winchester blood, your dad’s blood. Slots right in between your dad’s guns, your dad’s car, your dad’s music, your dad’s jacket.” The creature pauses in mock-confusion. “Oh, my. Dean, do you have _anything_ that’s yours? Because baby Sammy does, you know. Lucky kid, she got out. She has her own education, her own way of thinking. She even has her own favourite colour, her own favourite food, her _own_ favourite music. Not that you’ve ever asked her for any of it, of course. Because… what’s that thing you used to say? ‘Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts her cakehole’?”

“Shut up.”

It snaps its fingers. “I forgot. You _do_ have something. You have your hot nights rolling with all the girls in this town. And all the girls one town over. And the town across the river.” It ransacks Dean’s memories. “Because they owe you, don’t they, after you save their crummy lives? They _owe_ you sex. See, I’ll tell you a secret. I’ve been one of those girls, once upon a time. The Cassies, the Noras, the Lisas of the world? They don’t owe you shit.” It raises its hands in mock surrender. “Still, ya gotta get off somehow. Even if it takes more and more each time. More and more and more and more...." A sly smile. "Even if it takes lace panties.”

“Shut up!”

“And when someone’s right and you don’t want to admit it, you tell them to shut up.”

“SHUT UP!” Dean swings; the creature dodges. 

“Is it ever gonna be enough, Dean? Are _they_ ever gonna be enough?”

It might be Dean’s imagination, but as he rushes the creature for the final time, driving the silver blade into its chest, its eyes lose their mocking glint. That, in their corners, there’s something less wicked. Just for a moment, before he severs its windpipe with a squelching CRACK. 

“That felt good,” he murmurs, swaying.

And passes out.

CUT.

Meg and Sam in the car. 

“You alright?” Meg asks.

“Just please drive,” Sam manages, hunched over. “Just—if you don’t mind just please drive, _drive_ —”

“Alrighty.” Meg guns it and they screech out of town. 

“I think I killed someone,” Sam says after a while. She replays the scene in her hand. The gun was in her hand when she pulled the trigger. It’s still in her back pocket, digging into her flesh like a white-hot accusation. She pulls it out. “Is there a body—"

"You tell me," Meg grunts, "You're the one who killed someone."

"—Of water somewhere?” Sam finishes. And turns to Meg with a glare.

Meg chuckles. "Too soon?" She shakes her head. "Body of water. Alright. I’ll find one.”

CUT.

Meg and Sam standing on a bridge overlooking a small polluted lake. Sam is frantically rubbing the gun, getting her fingerprints off it as best she can. Meg stands at her side as she hurls the gun, wrapped in a plastic bag, over the side of the bridge. Sam drops her head as the gun sinks like a stone into brown water.

“Where to next?” Meg asks.

Sam’s face is teary. “Meg, am I going to hell?”

Meg shakes her head, keeping her smile to herself. She pats Sam’s shoulder. “Not for this. C’mon.”

CUT.

Dean is unconscious, still locked in the room with the shifter. Cassie is on the outside. She sinks down until they’re slumped, paralleled, on either side of the door.

Dean shifts, recovers. He’s bleeding. He’s been knocked around bad. He stands, winces, spits a bit of blood onto the floor, and unlocks the door with a shaking hand. Behind him, the shapeshifter is starting to dissolve.

CUT.

Dean’s lying down on Cassie’s couch, slightly patched up, as Cassie hands him some water. 

“You really have those scars,” Cassie murmurs, pushing up his sleeve to check for more wounds under his clothes. 

“Not the way I’d imagined you getting my clothes off,” Dean mutters in reply. Cassie purses her lips.

“So they’re from… monsters?”

Dean shakes his head. “Nah, just… hunting trips. Shit like… mountain lions.”

Cassie knows he’s lying. She knows there is a desiccating shapeshifter in her bedroom upstairs. And this is a threshold for her. She could say that she knows it’s otherworldly beings; she could say she now _knows_ Dean and his sister fight the very real monsters that lurk in the dark. She could jump in, swim hard, never look back at the ‘normal’ world that protects her like a curtain.

Or she could agree that it’s mountain lions.

She says nothing. 

“How’d you know it wasn’t me?” Dean asks after a while, staring at the ceiling as he allows Cassie to place one more bandage on his arm. It’s hard to speak. Every movement causes small spasms of pain.

Cassie raises her eyebrows. “Do you want the honest answer or the kind one?”

“Honest.”

Cassie exhales through her nose and half-smiles. “He apologised to me.” Dean takes that in, turns his head away with a small groan. “Also, he ate a hazelnut kit-kat. And you’re allergic. So.”

“Smart,” he murmurs.

Cassie nods.

“I gotta go, Cassie.”

“You should stay and get well.”

“I can’t.”

“Dean…”

“I can’t.”

“I know.” She gives him a look. It’s the one the shapeshifter had in its eyes as it died: pity. We wonder how much of the shapeshifter's taunts she heard. It doesn't matter. Explanations for Dean's behaviour aren't the same as excuses. “And to be honest… I don’t want you to.”

Dean presses his face into the pillow.

CUT.

Cassie is standing in her doorway. Dean is on the stoop outside, most of the blood wiped away, 

“Take care out there with the… mountain lions,” Cassie says. “And thank you.”

Dean shrugs, cavalier. “You know how it is. Savin’ people, huntin’ things. Family business. Ain’t no thing.”

“Well, take care.” She presses some first aid supplies into his hands.

Dean nods. “I will.” A pause. “Thanks, Cassie.”

Cassie smiles tightly. Dean gathers the disinfectant and bandages into one hand, flips a joke salute with the other, and heads down the stairs. Cassie watches as he shoulders whatever he shoulders in his mind. He straightens, gets into the Impala, drives down the street and out of sight. She sits down hard on her front steps.

CUT.

Dean drives until he cracks. Until he pulls over on the side of the road. He knows he’s completely lost track of Sam.

He calls her anyway. No answer. Sends a text.

Then he calls his dad.

His cheek and swollen lip are bleeding again as he raises the phone to his ear. No answer, so he leaves a message in his voicemail.

“Hey, Dad. It’s Dean. If you’re out there… if you’re getting this… I—” his voice falters. “I could use your help. I just -” He closes his eyes. “Shifter. No big deal, I iced it before it hurt anyone else.” A pause. “It—had my face, Dad. It had my face.”

He hangs up. Drops the phone into his lap. Leans his head back against the carseat. 

CUT.

John Winchester. He’s alive. We see him for the first time since the night of the fire. He has wrinkles and two new scars, and his hair’s gone grey. His phone is to his ear; he’s listening to Dean’s tinny voicemail, standing outside a crumbling stone building surrounded by New England forest. The message ends. He closes his eyes. Inhales deeply. He can’t bring himself to delete the message, but he can’t answer it either. He slides his phone back into his pocket.

CUT.

Dean stares at his phone for a long moment, as if waiting for his father to call back. He swallows. Shakes his head.

When his dad’s out of commission, he and Sam have had a place to go. It’s ramshackle and it isn’t convenient or close by, but it’s got a roof (albeit leaky), a bed—and, most importantly, a cabinet of booze. He makes another call.

“Hey Bobby,” he rasps out, clearing his throat roughly. “Long time no see. Can I crash at your place for a night?”

A gruff voice, old and paternal. “You’ll have to earn your keep.”

Dean half-chuckles. “Just for one night…?”

“The amount of girls you’ve probably said that to!”

Dean snorts. Waits for Bobby’s answer.

“Get your ass over here, kid.”

CUT.

Dean, driving down an anonymous highway toward a destination that we know will be Singer Salvage. Periodically, he grits his teeth, squeezes his eyes shut, replaying his time with Cassie, his fight with the shifter, the accusations it threw at him. “Your dad’s music…”

To drown out his thoughts, he turns on the radio.

CUT.

End credits music as Dean drives on: Gold Guns Girls by Metric.


	5. LEVITICUS.

We open on Singer Salvage. Bobby Singh—who rarely leaves his house and goes by Bobby Singer to the outside public because this is America and America sucks—is the salvage lot’s founder, proprietor, and sole caretaker. The lot is battered, ramshackle, and of course a cover for Bobby’s _real_ job: his underground library, stacked floor to ceiling for two square acres with legends dating back as far as writing has been around. It’s the largest resource the hunters have at their disposal. Bobby Singh is old, he’s drunk, he’s forgotten more ways to kill a shtriga than most young hunters will ever know, but he’s the best damn researcher the community’s ever had. 

Dean pulls up to the lot. Navigates the car’s elegant body into Bobby’s beat-up garage. Makes his weary way up the breaking front steps, avoiding the jagged hole in one of them. Knocks in a special rhythm on the peeling green front door.

OBLIGATORY SUPERNATURAL TITLE SEQUENCE. THEME SONG: “SEPTEMBER” BY EARTH WIND AND FIRE. JAZZY MONTAGE OF MARY WINCHESTER DYING.

Bobby unlocks two locks, opens the door a crack, sees Dean, unlocks one final lock, and lets him cross the threshold. Before a greeting, it’s the ritual; silver on the arm and holy water in the face, which Dean grits his teeth through, and a small cut on the arm to prove his blood is human.

No words have been exchanged. Then Bobby surges forward and wraps Dean in a hug.

Dean pushes him off. Bobby’s beard and hair are even longer than they’d been two years ago, pulled up in a ratty knot on the back of his head to keep it out of his eyes. “Save it,” he mutters.

“It’s good to see you, kid,” Bobby says, unfazed, his brown eyes warm. His mouth curves up wide beneath his prematurely-white beard. He’s not much older than John Winchester, but judging from the lines and knife-marks on his face, he’s had a tougher life. He’s got somewhat of a pleasing face - a smaller Sam used to compare him to Santa Claus. Bobby isn’t exactly jovial, but he’s closer to the “welcoming type” than any other hunter Dean’s met, plus he could probably rock a red suit come Christmas. Not that he ever came over for Christmas. Not that they had much Christmas at all. Mary was Jewish, Dean remembers, or at least had family who was; but when she died, that was that. And Christmas served the young Winchesters well, as well as anything did. Sam, gloved hand pressed into Dean’s ungloved one, would walk around town in the evenings, her eyes wide in wonder and face turned up to the lights, hungrily drinking in the glows from the wealthy neighbourhoods’ windows. John would be out after a werewolf or a changeling, making sure nobody had to grieve a freak death on Christmas Day, while a shivering Dean snuck Sam out of the motel and occupied her with holiday lights and window shopping as Sam tried to fit her chapped young lips around “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” or “Joy to the World.” Perhaps those nighttime outings, two young feet wandering far-off streets beneath music of tinny commercial speakers, was what made Sam grow up spiritual. Dean, four extra years between his shoulders, saw plain old electricity and wealth inequality where Sam saw a miracle light. As long as he lived he’d never been floored by beauty in the way that she was. But, in some small way, he was glad she was. 

Seeing Bobby brings it back. Despite John’s snappish protests, Bobby kept tabs on the children back when they were, well, children. And even when they grew older and ganglier and more resistant to his interventions, he’s the one who helped Sam with her FAFSA, provided his own legal address for her application to Stanford. Dean can grudgingly respect that, even if Bobby’s been a nuisance, delaying and derailing their hunter education for years. He’s been a reluctant safehouse; Sam’s even spent a birthday here.

“Got a beer?” Dean asks, and Bobby grunts an affirmative. He swivels and heads into the kitchen, pulls one from the dingy refrigerator while Dean looks around his living room, even dirtier than it used to be. It’s gotten shabbier each year since Bobby’s wife Missouri died, and now it’s almost drained of colour. Bobby claimed it was a demon who possessed her, a demon he couldn’t exorcise and had to kill. And Dean hadn’t believed him, until now.

CUT.

“Look,” Meg says, pulling over and turning to Sam. “I’m not gonna lie. It’s been nice to have company. But I can’t shuttle you around forever, ’specially now that you’re running from the cops.”

Sam nods wordlessly. She knew this was coming. “You’ve done more than enough, Meg. I’m in your debt,” she confesses.

Meg shrugs that off. “Anywhere I can drop you?” she asks.

“I don’t…” Sam bites her lip. There’s another name, a person she knows that’s fairly close by, but he’s not one of the people on John’s map. He’s older. “Ansem Weems” is the name, rising unbidden to Sam’s mind. He’s a solid two hours away. Leeds, Wyoming. She knows what he looks like; brown eyes, dark hair in a buzzcut. Maybe she can make it up to Meg somehow.

“Could we go to Leeds?” she asks. “Wyoming?”

“Ya got family there?” Meg asks with a smirk.

“I guess.” And maybe they _are_ related, Sam realises. Maybe that’s why she’s drawn to them. A blood connection. They don’t look alike—Max and Rosie are white, James Talley is Black, Lily Baker is half-Asian, and so forth, but they _could_ be related through John, _maybe_...? Her thoughts trail off.

“Sure thing,” says Meg, turning the steering wheel back onto the road. “Gonna have to let you off in Leeds, though. You’ll have to take it from there.”

Sam has enough money to last her a while. If she has to, she can pawn Mary’s necklace or the tiny cross that hangs around her neck. What’s two more losses? “Can-do.”

And down the highway they tear. 

“Where were _you_ going?” Sam asks, unable to believe this is the first time the thought has occurred to her.

Meg shrugs. “No destination, only the road. Trip across America. Meeting you’s been the best part.”

She says it like it’s no big thing, but it warms Sam to her core. She has a friend. And it’s been lonely, since Jake. Nothing has felt real. She’s kept her phone off to sever contact from her college circle, from Luis and Rani and Meera and Kate. She’s had no-one except Dean. But now she has Meg.

For two hours more. Then she’s alone again.

“You’ve done so much for me,” Sam says. “I mean—thank you, Meg. You’re just… good.”

“Pff.” Meg smirks to herself. “I'll tell you what, Samantha. You’re worth it.”

CUT.

“Is that why you cut contact?” Bobby asks, nursing a beer between his palms. “You ’n John never believed Missouri was possessed? Thought I’d just gone off the deep end, shot her?”

Dean nodded. “That or ghost possession.”

“I don’t blame you,” Bobby sighed. “Years went by, I almost believed it myself. But I saw those black eyes. Saw her walk through those bullets. Started paintin’ Devil’s Traps in every room, keepin’ salt in every corner.”

“And spraying holy water every time I walk in the damn door,” Dean mutters.

“Nothin’ personal.”

Dean swigs his piss-poor beer. The refrigerator must be broken because it isn’t even cold.

“You seem pretty beat up,” Bobby remarks after silence falls.

Dean shrugs. “Shifter.”

Bobby nods in comprehension. “Whose form it take?”

“Mine.”

Bobby raises one eyebrow and wordlessly grabs Dean another beer.

CUT.

Meg and Sam have arrived in Leeds. Sam directs Meg through the streets as she did before, able to sense where Ansem is. They pass through main thoroughfares, leaving behind sandy-colured buildings and weaving into darker, poorer streets, and then out into surrounding plains. “You’re sure?” Meg asks as downtown Leeds drops away in the rearview mirror.

Sam nods.

Meg shrugs, keeps going on the open road. It’s not long before the road curves they can make out a fence, barbed wire, and a squat building behind it.

It’s a prison. Leeds County Penitentiary. Sam bites her lip and hopes to death Meg doesn’t comment.

Meg doesn’t comment.

Sam turns on her phone, types a text to Dean. 

CUT.

“How’s Sam?”

Dean shrugs.

“You don’t know? I thought you watched over her like a hawk.”

Dean stiffens. “It’s not your business,” he says with an edge to his voice. “She ain’t your kid.”

Bobby puts his beer down, raises his hands. “Alright, alright.” He wipes his mouth. 

“She’s gone,” Dean admits after a while. “Took off. Won’t answer her phone.”

Bobby’s eyes widen. His gruff voice turns anxious. “You’re serious?”

Dean nods. Fishes in his pocket, pulls out the pages from John’s journal and Sam’s note.

_Dean -_

_Nothing bad happened, I promise. I’ve gone to find Max. Took the map with me. Did the research you asked; nothing new. Ploutos is god of wealth. All items on the list are mythical - Mjölnir is Thor’s hammer, etc. Could possibly be used in hunts - if it were real, of course. Can’t make sense of the reference to Psalm 24. “Colt” could refer to the man or the gun (or a horse), but I figure you knew that already. My guess is it’s the gun. Maybe Dad’s looking for it. Thought about why - maybe it can kill the demon that killed Mom._

_I know that’s a lot of maybes. Sorry to leave while you were out. I left you some money so you can lay off the credit card scamming for a while._

_Enjoy your burger!_

_Sam._

He pushes everything across the table to Bobby. “Can you make sense of this? Ploutos? Colt?”

Bobby pushes his beer away, reaches into his front pocket for reading glasses. “Rings a bell,” he mutters. He clears his throat and stands. “Gonna need a minute with these. Bed upstairs is all yours. First-aid supplies in the cabinet. Aspirin’s probably expired, but them’s the breaks. If you go for my prescription meds I’ll put a bullet in your cortex.”

“Which one?”

Bobby mutters something about semantics and turns away, Sam’s and John’s writing clenched in his fist. Only he (and Missouri, when she was alive) could make sense of his library’s archival system, but if anyone’s got information on what connects “the Colt” to the mythological Greek god of wealth, it’s Bobby. 

“Thanks, Bobby,” Dean says to his back, but he’s not sure the man hears.

CUT.

Dean removes the bandages Cassie laid on him tenderly, cleans his cuts, and patches himself up in the mirror, expertly smearing disinfectant across the healing wounds. He stretches, popping his back, and cracks his knuckles. Pulls out his phone.

To his surprise, Sam’s left a text.

_Hi Dean - Everything’s fine. Caught a ride with a friend._

“Bullshit,” Dean mutters. “You don’t have any friends.”

_I know you’re probably thinking ‘bullshit, you don’t have any friends.’ Shockingly, I do._

Okay. “Not bad, Sammy.”

_‘Not bad, Sammy.’ Yeah, yeah, I know, I can read you like a book. I’m fine. Again, sorry to take off. Found Dad yet?_

Dean snorts, and types back, _as if you care._

It’s bait. Sam doesn’t rise to it. He scowls, throws himself down on the squeaky bed. A cloud of dust rises from the cushions and Dean spends the next two minutes coughing miserably.  
CUT.

“Thanks again, Meg,” Sam says, pulling all her junk from Meg’s car. Meg helps her unload the second suitcase. They’re outside a motel, not far from the prison.

“You’re sure you’re gonna be okay?”

“I’m gonna be just fine,” Sam tells her. She means it. 

“Okay. Well, I’ll check in in a couple hours via text, if that’s all right. Dangerous world out there n’ all. Just th’other day, some guy with a truck just like this one got his throat slit in an alleyway.”

Sam shudders. “Yikes.”

“Stay safe.” Meg claps her on the shoulder, flips her pale blond bangs. “See ya around, Samantha.”

Sam smiles. “See you, Meg.”

Meg drives off, and Sam loads everything into her motel room. She unloads her laptop, googles _how to ward against demons,_ pokes around past the bullshit until she finds a legitimate-seeming site, and carefully pencils in a devil’s trap on the ceiling above her door (standing on a dresser) before laying lines of salt down across the windows. She locks her most valuable possessions in the motel safe, then unloads her suitcase. She googles the requirements for being an orderly—or any sort of employee—at a prison, rummages around in her disguises until she pulls out baggy pants and a vest. Janitor it is. She opens her makeup kit, darkens the area around her eyes to age herself up a few years, applies fake lashes, and arranges a cheap wig on her head. On her way out, she asks the receptionist for a mop.

CUT.

Sam, disguised as a janitor, mop in hand, stands at the entrance to the prison. The first guard she encounters scans her boredly. He’s clearly been up for hours. “Night shift?” he asks.

“Gloria Hernandez,” Sam introduces herself, showing a fake state-issued ID, her eyes downcast. “I forgot my barcode.” She keeps her voice low, disguised by a thick Hispanic accent. The guard sighs, groans. Sam knows how she appears: she’s aiming for a very specific stereotype. Latina woman, doesn’t speak good English, servile and incompetent, unthreatening. It’s disgusting how easily they buy it, how easily they always buy it. She bumbles around in the insulting suit, but the (white) man, griping at the state of employee behaviour these days, checks her ID - satisfies himself that it matches her face - and lets her in. 

CUT.

She can’t find Ansem’s cell. That is, she knows where it is, but it’s in a section of rooms that’s locked. She’s about to give up when a guard comes up behind her. “Need a hand, cleaning lady?” he asks. 

Sam nods and murmurs something she hopes sounds like Spanish. 

He unlocks the door, ushers her through. As she goes, the guard smiles. His eyes flick black. When the door shuts behind Sam, he eyes the security camera above him. It’s off.

Sam hurries down the hallway. It’s dim and eerie, somehow both louder and quieter than she’d expected, prisoners’ voices echoing against the cold walls. The hallway churns with anger and the injustice of years, fatigue and forced isolation. People watch her through the bars and she’s grateful for how the baggy uniform hides her body, how the long wig hides her face. Speedwalking, it’s not long before she’s reached the bars of Ansem’s cell.

He’s sitting in the shadows, in the far corner of the tiny room, light just barely reaching his eyes.

“Mr. Weems?” she asks, her voice low.

“Samantha Winchester,” he greets her.

“Shhh!” she hisses.

“Don’t worry.” He waves a hand; he’s got a wheezy voice. “They can’t hear us. All the guards cleared out when you got here. Cameras are off.”

Sam blinks. All she can manage is, “Why?”

Ansem shrugs. “Your lucky day, I guess.” 

Something doesn’t seem right.

“What did you do?” Sam whispers without preamble.

“To land me in here?”

Sam nods. 

“Killed three people at a truck stop.”

Sam freezes.

“Did they, um, have it coming?” she asks after a moment, her voice uncertain.

“Thieves at my business.” Ansem shrugs. “You decide.”

“And you… killed them?”

“Cut one’s windpipe in half. Tore one’s leg off. Hit the third with a truck.”

Sam tries to imagine the logistics of that. “Um… .At the same time?”

Ansem chuckles. Stands up. Crosses to Sam, stands opposite the from her, and she steps back quickly from the bars. “With my mind.”

“What?”

Ansem closes his eyes, slams a hand against his side of the bars. A vision bursts into Sam’s mind.

She’s staring through a window at a dusty road. She’s Ansem, she’s seeing through Ansem’s eyes. He’s--they’re--standing behind the counter of some sort of food franchise, but from this angle Sam can’t see the name. It sells hot-dogs, pretzels, cheap burgers. Three men come by. One pretends to order, then jumps the counter and punches him the second Ansem turns away while the other two burst through the side-gate and lift as much food as they can carry. They make off with it, desperate, tearing out the door. Blinding anger shoots through Ansem-Sam. He runs after the closest man, gets a hand on him. There’s a sickening crack, and head twists and he falls to the floor. The other stares, jumps, runs faster, but Ansem-Sam reaches in his direction and suddenly there’s a gaping hole where his leg had been, fatal gouts of blood pouring out as he collapses. The third man is already outside the glass double-doors, racing across the parking lot. Ansem-Sam glares, focuses, and a truck moves, rolls out from where it’s parked, barrels into him. His skull hits the asphalt and bursts like a tomato.

The vision ends. Sam’s sweating, her vision swimming. One of her hands is shaking like a leaf.

“Been able to do shit like that for ages,” Ansem explains coolly.

“And you…” Sam catches her breath, “Hurt people with it?”

“I got angry. I paid the price for it, I assure you.” He gestures to his cell, then rubs a hand along his jaw. “I didn’t want to,” he admits. “To this day I don’t know why I did.” He looks Sam up and down sharply. “You can do it too, can’t you?”

Sam nods. “Yeah. Um, did you have a house fire?”

Ansem looks somewhat perplexed by the sudden change in topic. “A house fire? No.”

“You’re sure?”

Ansem blinks. “...I’m sure.”

“Oh,” Sam says. “Okay.”

They stand in silence for a _really_ awkward amount of time as Sam tries to puzzle it out.

“You should probably go,” Ansem says when nothing more is forthcoming.

“Yeah,” Sam agrees shakily. “I think I should.”

“As you pass people, you can put an image of an empty hallway into their minds,” Ansem tells her. “They won’t notice you. And you won’t ever need a lockpick to pick locks.”

Sam narrows her eyes. “Then why are you still in here?” 

Ansem spreads his hands.

“There has to be a reason.”

Ansem sighs. “An addiction, sweetheart,” he croons in his breathy rickety voice. “The more you use it, the better it feels. In here, I quit cold turkey. Hurts every day, but it’s what I have to do.” He cuts himself off, as if he’s said more than he meant to. “If I got out, I’d hurt more people.” He retreats from Sam, folds himself back up in the darkest corner of his cell. Shadow falls across his face, obscuring it completely, and he leans his head back to rest against the wall. “I don’t want to.”

“Is it going to take me over?” Sam asks, staring at her hands as if they’ll suddenly betray her. “Am I going to turn out like you? Like Max?”

Ansem doesn’t reply. After a long moment, haunted, Sam begins to run.

She hears Ansem call after her. Six words, but for some reason they strike a chill through every chord of her, and she skids to a sudden stop.

“Look for the yellow-eyed scapegoat.”

“What?” Sam asks, whirling. “The yellow-eyed scapegoat?”

Silence.

She bursts out the door, makes it three steps down the hallway before she realises she’s left the mop leaning against the wall. She turns. Without warning, she flashes back to her altercation with Max, the moment when she stretched her arm out for his gun and it lifted itself from the floor and sailed toward her. She closes her eyes, concentrates.

The mop whizzes through the closing door and smacks right into her hand. She grasps it, spins on her heel and dashes, feet hitting hard against white tiles, before she can think about what she’s done.

CUT.

Sam sprints off. Behind her, black smoke drifts up from a corner on the floor and Meg appears out of it, watching Sam hurry out. Teleportation is a standard demonic power, but it always tires them. She wipes her forehead, clenches her jaw, phases through two doors and right into Ansem’s cell.

He looks up. Meg drops down in front of him, raising and holding a gleaming knife to his throat. “What did you tell her?” she asks with a leery smile, eyes black.

“Nothing,” Ansem manages, throat working frantically up and down. He plasters himself against the corner of his cell. “Nothing, nothing—”

“Right,” Meg hisses, low and dangerous. She’s in his personal space, crouched over him predatory, forcing them nose to nose.

“I swear,” Ansem forces out.

Meg nods, pulls the knife away from his throat. Ansem relaxes.

She whirls and jams the knife into his forehead instead.

He spasms, gushes blood. She collects it carefully, recites the incantation. She whispers to the entity, “the scapegoat of the lord,” that she has just killed Ansem, that “Samantha Winchester knows something now. I’m sorry. I don’t know what. I’ll find out.” 

CUT.

Dean has passed out on Bobby’s guest cot upstairs. He’s dreaming.

_He’s in a motel with young Sam. It’s Christmastime. She has a bowl of cereal in front of her even though it’s night outside. Dean’s returning from Walmart. He’s always shoplifted her presents, but this is the first year she’s canny to it. When he hands her the small gifts wrapped badly in newspaper, Sam asks with narrowed eyes where he got them from. Dean splutters something because Sam is eight and now she knows they’re poor but she hasn’t yet realised not everyone else is. Something’s not right; the memory isn’t right. They’re not in a motel any more, there’s lights on the walls, the pretty kind Sam likes, and Dean’s too old. Dean’s seventeen by a day and he stumbles, as best he can, through telling the story of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to—_

_“Ourselves?” Sam asks. She won’t touch the gifts because when Dean had wrapped them he’d got the blood of two nuns on the ribbons. And that’s when a beast breaks through the window, a black swirling mass of claws and foot-long teeth, and it turns toward Sam, who is an adult now, who is screaming, who has coal black eyes—_

There’s a loud knock at his door, and he jolts awake, grabs his pistol from under his pillow, and has it aimed at the door before he’s even fully opened his eyes. 

He opens his eyes.

“It’s just me, Dean,” Bobby grumbles, opening the door to reveal his exasperated wrinkled face. “Did you get your beauty rest, your highness?”

Dean scrubs his eyes, un-cocks the gun. “Sure.”

Bobby’s got several old books in his well-worn hunter’s hands. “I think we’ve got ourselves an explanation to John’s notes,” he says. “Come on down. This could be big.”

CUT. Dean and Bobby downstairs. Apparently Bobby knows Ellen, Jo, and Ash even better than Dean does, because he’s them up on a grainy Skype call, all three of them clustered in front of the low-res webcam Ash’s computer. Dean flips Ash a small wave, shoots Jo a wink. She gives him a disbelieving headshake in return. 

“Look,” says Bobby, spreading his books out on the table. “I scoured the library. We got stories like this datin’ back centuries. Walpurgisnight from _Faust_. Goblin Market, that old Rossetti poem. Fairy Market, the van Rossnyk painting.”

“Stories like what?” Ellen asks.

Bobby blinks, realising he hasn’t explained yet. “Places and times where otherworldly creatures gather together, sell their wares. It’s linked to the idea of the ‘outside over there.’ It’s popped up in mythology for centuries. Fae markets and suchlike. As I’m sure you can guess, they’re often traps.” 

Ash nods. Dean can’t believe they’re buying this. “Fairies?”

“Not literally,” Bobby snaps. “Here’s my thinking:” he clears his throat. “Old World lore saw a lot fewer divisions between legend and fact than we do today. There’s a reason for that.”

“Like, maybe there was more magic way back when?” Jo asks. 

“Right,” Ellen cuts in. “Before hunters were an organised group, before we were effective at… what we do, there were more monsters.” 

Bobby nods. “Monsters. Ghouls, witches, creatures that people called goblins and fairies runnin’ rampant, congregatin’ into societies of their own. My guess is, the hunters of old couldn’t clean ’em out completely, and these goblin markets still operate in the present day. Or claim to.”

“And you think,” Dean gapes, “What, that _fairies_ are out there selling the shit mentioned in Dad’s journal? Mjölnir? Like THEE Mjölnir?”

“Not fairies,” Bobby scoffs, rolling his eyes. “An entity who goes by the name Ploutos.”

“Right,” Ellen says, nodding.

“You believe this crap?”

“Why not?” Jo asks, a sparkle in her eyes. “There’s witches and ghouls. Why not goblins and fairies?”

“Not _fairies_ ,” Bobby reminds her wearily. “Humans always are misinterpreting things.”

“Yeah,” Dean snorts, “Tell me about it. People have misinterpreted _me_ as a fairy.”

Silence.

“I mean,” Dean says, trying to emphasise how laughable the concept is, “A gay dude.”

Silence.

Dean blinks. Tries again. “Yeah, people are always misinterpreting things. If I didn’t know Bobby I’d think he was a fairy too.”

Silence. 

“Guys,” Dean pleads. “Come on.”

“Dean, if there’s something you’d like to share with the class…”

“Shut up, Ash.”

Bobby gives him a dirty look. “Dean,” he says with perfect articulation, “I may be an old dry geezer and you may be a bigot and a half, but I want you to know I’m bisexual.”

Dean looks as though Bobby has just sprouted a second head. “The fuck is that?”

Silence.

“Was that like a really weird sneeze?”

Silence.

“Okay,” says Ellen, clearly uncomfortable. “Um, can we get back to the whole hunting down a demon thing?”

A visible ripple of relief. “Yeah,” Bobby agrees. “Okay. Goblin markets. That brings me to the Colt. That’s Samuel Colt, gunmaker. Possible hunter. Legend says,” Bobbly slaps three books in quick succession, raising dust from each of them, “He made a gun forged from the same material as an angel’s blade. This gun can kill anything an angel can kill. So, basically, it can kill anything.”

“Angels aren’t real,” Dean cuts in smugly.

“I _know_ ,” Bobby snaps. “Once again, we’re dealing with _legends_.”

“Well, we can’t know,” Ellen points out. “I mean, it’s practically impossible to prove something _doesn’t_ exist.”

Dean knows Sam has a word for that. Devil’s paradox or something. He scoffs. “Dude, has anyone ever even claimed to have _met_ an angel?”

Ash raises his hand tentatively. “I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing called the Bible…”

“Or Qu’ran,” Jo and Ellen say at exactly the same time.

“Okay but like, that’s the _Bible_.” He flaps his hand. “And the other thing.” 

“Fair enough,” says Bobby. “But we’re not here to discuss whether or not angels or fairies exist—”

“They don’t.”

Bobby throws his hands up. “ _Fine!_ But what we’re trying to do here is _figure out where John Winchester is._ And my guess is, he believes in the legend of the Colt, this gun that can kill anything. We know bullets don’t work on half the beasts out there, so this gun would be invaluable to any hunter. Judgin’ by the rest of John’s notes, he’s tryin’ to find the Colt at one of these goblin markets, one that also sells the other items listed here: Mjölnir, the Amulet of Hesperus, the Angel Tablet, the Crystalmallow—Chrysalamos—Chrysomallos—Fleece. Most likely, the salesman is named Ploutos. I’d bet _anythin’_ John’s tryin’ to find this market. Chances are, we find it, we find him.”

“And the Colt,” Jo adds.

“And the Colt,” Bobby finishes. He lets out a sigh, looks up briefly. “John, what on God’s green earth are you doing,” he mutters.

“He just wants to gank the thing that killed mom,” Dean snaps. Anger surges.

Bobby gives him a dark look. “I know.”

“What about the Psalm?” Jo asks.

“Right. Colt etched a prayer onto every one of his weapons. I guess you can tell this special gun from the others because it’s got Psalm 23 verse 4.”

Dean pries his fist back open, forcing his arms to relax. “Where’s the fairy market then, genius?” he asks, voice rougher than it should be.

“I’ll run keywords,” Ash says. He pulls out another laptop.

“Dude. How many of those do you have?” Dean asks.

Ash shrugs and begins typing. “I got nimble fingers.”

“You shoplifted _laptops?!_ ”

“What,” Ash asks, “Like it’s hard?”

CUT.

Sam is back at her motal, tearing off her disguise, tossing the mop into the corner of the room, collapsing down on her bed, dropping her head into her hands. She pulls up her phone, texts Dean. “Was told to look for the—CUT

“Yellow-eyed Scapegoat,” Dean reads out from his phone.

“Huh?” Ash asks.

“Yellow-eyed Scapegoat,” Dean repeats. “Sam was told to, quote, look for the yellow-eyed scapegoat.” He texts back to Sam, _huh?_

“What about it?” Jo asks.

“Is that a demon?” Ash asks. He switches tabs, types in “Scapegoat demon.” One second later, his face turns pale.

 _is that a demon?_ Dean texts Sam.

She replies, _I don’t know. It’s connected to all those faces Dad had on the map in the motel, which means it’s connected to Mom._

And then, _Dean. It’s connected to me._

“Ash?” Dean asks, dark tightness in his voice. “Is it a demon?”

Ash is scrolling frantically, his face drawn. “Um, guys,” he says, clearing his throat. “Guys.”

“What?”

“Um. Not to put too fine a point on it, but...” Ash trails his finger through the air, “You’re fucked.”

“What?”

“It’s,” Ash nervously screws up his hair. “It’s. Yeah. It’s a demon.”

Jo looks over his shoulder. She blanches too.

“And?” Dean asks, blunt.

“It might be the oldest demon in the book.”

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Ash inhales carefully. “Azazel.”

CUT.

Meg is standing outside her truck when Ash’s voice echoes in her ears. Azazel. Azazel. Across the country, people’s eyes flick black, their ears metaphorically prick up. Like a ripple spreading outward, every demon in Azazel’s service hears Ash invoke his name. They vanish.

CUT.

Every demon has reappeared in a ring around the Roadhouse. One has gasoline. One has a lighter.

CUT. 

“He’s a demon from Leviticus,” Bobby says heavily, paging through an ancient Bible.

“Don’t,” says Dean sharply. He pulls the Bible away from Bobby, drops it on the floor as if it’s burnt him. “Dont.”

“Dean—”

“Just _don’t_ ,” he growls. “Find it on Google.”

“I think I’ve read enough.” Bobby sighs. He shakes his head. “Azazel. He’s been feared since before the Bible was written. He’s first mentioned in the scapegoat rite of Yom Kippur.”

“And we’re supposed to believe he’s the thing that killed Mom?” Dean snaps. He looks down, pinches the bridge of his nose hard enough to blanch his fingers. “This demon, it’s powerful, it goes all over. Yom Kippur, that’s a Jewish holiday, and Mom was Jewish. It’s like what you said, Ash, about how he kills the families of faith.” He turns toward the computer. “Ash?”

He looks at the Skype window. Ash, Ellen, and Jo are gone. “Ash?”

Bobby and Dean cram close to the screen, as if that’ll help them see better. No Ash, no Ellen, no Jo. Instead, a person with black eyes comes into view. Smiles. Severs the call.

Dean and Bobby look at each other. Bobby shoots out of his seat, jerks down the nearest landline phone, immediately calls the Roadhouse. The phone is picked up, but they don’t hear the sounds of human voices. Instead they hear the sounds of burning wood.

Ellen’s phone. Nothing. Jo’s phone. Nothing. Ash’s phone. Nothing. 

Dean calls Sam.

“Sam?” he asks.

Miracle of miracles, she picks up. “Dean?”

“We know the name of the demon that killed Mom.” He inhales slowly. “It’s Azazel.”

CUT.

Sam’s POV. Sitting on a motel bed. She bites her lip, casts a frightened look around her. She pulls a sweater tighter around her shoulders. “Azazel?” she asks in a whisper. “Like, THEE Biblical Azazel?”

“You’ve heard of him?”

“I’ve—I mean,” Sam swallows. “He’s powerful, Dean. He’s—the Jewish community, way back when in the desert—to atone for their sins, they sacrificed goats to him and to God. I mean—those are the two entities that had—equal power, maybe, and—” She swallows again, her breath accelerating, her voice veering toward hysterical. “Yeah, I’ve heard of him. And you sure? He killed Jake? He killed Mom?”

“Yeah. And...” He doesn’t tell Sam about the Roadhouse. He imagines it burning and closes his eyes. “Yeah.”

“Dean,” Sam’s breath is coming quickly; she’s going into a panic attack. She presses her phone between her shoulder and her ear, shoves herself off the bed and over to her suitcase, digs up her anxiety meds, frantically swallows them dry. “Dean,” her voice gives out, and returns quieter, cracked. “I’m scared.”

Dean flashes back to young Sam, eyes huge and frightened, clinging to his waist in a motel as a thunderstorm rages outside. “I’m scared,” she admits, reed-like. Her voice as small and weak now as it was then. 

“We have a way to kill the bastard, Sam,” Dean hisses urgently. “Ash and Bobby figured it out. There’s a gun—the Colt, Dad calls it. He’s looking for it. He’s gonna find it. It’s gonna be fine.”

“Why do you have so much FAITH IN HIM,” Sam scream-snaps, and ends the call. She throws her phone down onto her bed, tucks her legs into her chest, starts shaking. Her breath is fast, rapid. Azazel. 

She looks at her phone. Clenches her fists, psychically raises it off the bed. Lets it fall. She flashes back to Ansem, how she asked him _Is it going to take me over? Am I going to turn out like you? Like Max?_

“It's Azazel?” she asks nonsensically, her voice ragged. She trembles harder. 

A text from her phone. Meg, checking in like she’d promised.

“You all right, Sam?”

Sam, face smeared with tears, doesn’t answer. Instead she texts her dad.

_Where the fuck are you? Dean and I need you. Dean and I need you RIGHT NOW._

CUT. 

Once again, we’re with John Winchester. He’s standing outside a crumbling stone building, similar but different to the one he was at before. This building is even older; it’s clad in moss and dirt and dying ivy and it has no roof. Its door is ajar; we can see it’s completely empty inside, just dusty stone. 

The colour scheme of this scene is different, composed of softer, cooler tones. He’s in a rural area of New York State, not far from the town of Sleepy Hollow. 

He’s looking at his watch, ignoring his phone. Seconds to midnight. Midnight.

He opens the door of the building wider, then closes it again. Open. Shut. Open. Shut. The third time, it opens to reveal a fully furnished room, far larger than the building could actually hold. Gold light streams out from the doorway. Inside, there’s a red carpet leading directly away from the door, up to a raised stage with a podium, tables, boxed objects covered in cloth. On either side of the aisle are rows and rows of chairs. Entities - demons, witches, vampires, each finding their own entrance somewhere in the world - file in. This is a goblin market. Or rather, a goblin auction.

John joins them, closing the door behind them. 

As it slams shut, we CUT back to Sam.

“Yellow-eyed scapegoat,” she whispers to herself, over and over and over. When she looks at herself in the mirror, for an instant she has lemon-colored eyes. She gasps, backs away, slams herself into the wall, looks into the mirror again. Her eyes are normal.

She scrambles to her computer. She googles “Lily Baker.” Pulls up the same image of her she saw on her dad’s map. She closes her eyes, remembers what Ansem did in the cell. He forced an image into her head just by looking at her. She presses her hands against her temples, stares keenly at the pixels that compose Lily's face.

 _Lily_ , she thinks. _Lily Baker. Hi._

CUT. All the way in Michigan, Lily Baker’s eyes snap open. She hears Sam’s voice in her mind.

_It’s Samantha Winchester. Sorry, I know this is nuts and bonkers on literally every scale. Sorry. But, um. I think there’s something you ought to know._

CUT.

End Music: ‘Lemon Eyes’ by Meg Myers.


	6. NEHEMIAH.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some more depictions of characters to refresh ur memory! open the links in a new tab probably. here's [meg and sam](https://drive.google.com/file/d/187vTzmSFw1SG7UqvXlHKvfbGgG88ODBw/view?usp=sharing), here's [jo harvelle](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1srpwBol3Z5x0WwsrzsS0f5yA6B6Um7as/view?usp=sharing), and here's [bobby](https://drive.google.com/file/d/168dGwzXlvW2bXpcPtm50oRkWebaPG52J/view?usp=sharing).

John Winchester seats himself at the auction, looks around warily at all the creatures around him. Shapeshifters, vamps, witches, ghouls, most of them grimy. At first glance the room they’re in seems beautiful, but it doesn’t take long to realise the paint is peeling, the rococo ceiling swirls are made of asbestos, the wainscotting is plastic and falling apart. The tables are cheap plywood, the upholstery of the chairs is ripped and stained, and it could be blood. This isn’t high fantasy; it’s low, urban, greedy, messy. The witch is picking her nose, the shifter is scratching at her vulva. A phalanx of demons dressed in black suits with red ties, all with red eyes, stands in one corner. Their ringleader carries a red-tinted monocle in one hand. Nothing about him looks particularly demonic, at least by traditional standards. He has dark hair and good cheekbones and is wearing snakeskin shoes, and he can do really weird things with his tongue. He’ll be important later.

John shifts one seat down to be farther from the demons and casts his eyes up to the stage.

A puff of smoke. All the doors around the room sink back and seal themselves into the walls. “Welcome welcome,” calls a booming voice from centre stage. It’s an older man laden with jewelry, robed like a Greek god but wearing airpods (derogatory) and carrying a brand new iPad in one hand and a fitbit on his wrist. He waves his arm over the tables behind him, each tagged with a number. “To this decade’s Magic Market!”

Applause pours out from no discernable source. A few of the entities roll their eyes at the name. “I know, I know,” Ploutos calls. “Not the most inspiring of titles, though I have it on good authority it’s,” he draws air quotes, “Funnier in Enochian. But I promise this place will make it worth your while. Now, most of you know the rules,” he looks right at John and his eyes gleam, “But I’ll repeat them for newcomers. First,” he flourishes his hand, “No lies. Only barter with what you contractually own. We have experts here.” He indicates the cohort of red-eyed demons, a few of whom smile. “Second, you cannot leave until you have made a purchase.” He spreads his hands. “Them’s the breaks; if you ignore them we break _you_. Third, please do not physically or psychologically attack any of the guests,” again he looks at John Winchester, “Or you will be instantly dismembered. Any questions? Grand!” He sallies to the podium. “Our first item is a hot hot HOT commodity! Who would like to bid upon,” he reaches for the cloth-covered “1” on the table and unveils it, “THEEE Mjölnir?”

A rumble of curiosity throughout the guests. CUT.

OBLIGATORY SUPERNATURAL TITLE SEQUENCE. THEME SONG: “SEPTEMBER” BY EARTH WIND AND FIRE. JAZZY MONTAGE OF MARY WINCHESTER DYING, NOW WITH AN ADDED WILHELM SCREAM.

Sam, roughly massaging her temples, in a split-screen with Lily Baker. They talk telepathically, with great strain on both their parts. It isn’t a smooth conversation; it’s covered in static like a poor-connectivity international call. It causes them both intense headaches. The sensation of pushing words to each other across the distance between them is Sisyphisian. The first words are Lily’s.

>> I’ve had visions of you. Dreams, I think.

<< Same. I mean, me of you.

>> But this is… is real.

<< It’s not a dream. I’m sorry, Lily. I wish _[interference]_

>> Am I in danger?

<< I don’t know. _[interference]_ I guess… all we can do is… share it. _[interference]_ it all out. Maybe then we can figure out what’s going on.

>> Sam. I don’t know _[interference]_ This, talking to you like this… it doesn’t even seem weird. Shouldn’t it be weird?

<< We have to _[interference]_ quick. My head is pounding.

>> Mine too. Okay. Um. I’m Lily Baker. I’m eighteen years old. My dad _[interference]_ house fire when I was a baby. And last year my sister died. Of Leukemia. Slow death. _[interference]_ until I was--

<< What? I lost you after ‘slow death.’ And… sorry for your loss.

>> Whatever. _[interference]_ when I was at her funeral. I kind of, kind of--got overwhelmed. I...

<< Snapped.

>> Yeah. 

<< _[interference]_

>> And ever since then, everyone I _[interference]_ dies.

<< What?

>> Every person I touch dies. 

<< What?!

Lily lets out a massive groan, clutches her hands to her head, and the connection snaps.

“Lily,” Sam shouts at her screen. “Lily!”

Nothing. She stands, heads into her motel bathroom, jams two tylenol into her mouth. Digs around in her suitcase for some food to swallow them with. To her surprise, nestled near the top, are what look like home-made energy bars. They’re dark red, brown, with granola. There’s a rolled-up note.

“Hey, Samantha! I make these to give me energy on the road. Thought you might be able to use the extra punch. :) Meg.”

Sam’s eyes widen. A gift. She takes a bite gingerly, and surprise blooms over her face. They taste fucking _good_. She puts the rest away for later, returns to her computer. Closes her eyes. Readies her mind. Pulls up an image of James Talley. 

She makes a list, every single one of the names and faces she somehow knows, and reaches out to all of them. It’s a rinse-and-repeat montage; she takes more and more tylenol, far past the healthy amount. It starts to become worrying. Hands shaking, eyes blinking rapidly and pupils dilated wide, she forces every ounce of her focus on the psychic links. Takes more medication. The second she runs out she drops everything, pushes through a killer headache for two miles to a CVS, picks up aspirin, downs an entire extra strength bottle to keep on going. It would kill an ordinary human.

I’m sure we have realised now that she isn’t an ordinary human.

She gets back to her motel, re-opens her laptop, looks up name after name after name, finishing the rest of the energy bar. She keeps talking, focusing late into the night, not eating anything else, not drinking, unaware of the time. We as audience don’t know what she says; the only conversation we have been privy to is Lily’s. Sam gets out a notebook, jots down notes about every person she contacts as she munches down a second bar. Their abilities, their history, whether someone died in a house fire or not. Somehow, each of the names is linked to her. Every single one of them has had visions of her, of Sam, and she’s had visions of all of them, but none of them have had visions of each other. It’s like a wheel, and she’s the center, and they’re the disconnected spokes. 

She doesn’t know what to make of the diagram. She closes the notebook, presses her hands to her head, winces at the stabbing pains, and without warning collapses to the floor.

CUT.

“Now,” Ploutos is saying, still gesturing widely, and it’s possible he’s slightly physically larger than before, as if he’s feeding off his sales, “Whooooo is interested in our thirteenth item, the famed demon-hunting weapon of the legendary Samuel Colt! Rumor has it,” he drops his voice to a theatrical whisper, “It was forged from the molecules of an angel’s blade, imbued with age-old angelic grace.”

A loud booing from the crowd at the mere mention of angels. “Oh, I know,” Ploutos laughs, “We know better. Still,” he twirls a shiny gun between his fingers, “It is a mythical object and therefore, as all legends eventually become, available for purchase! Any offers?”

The demon I mentioned before, the dark-haired one with the red monocle, is now making out heavily with a pale brunette man in pink lipstick and a ratty suit, thoroughly ignoring the proceedings. The brunette man breaks away, licks his lips and eyes Ploutos’s performance, clearly intrigued and amused by his dismissal of angels. He has a heart pencilled in under one eye marina-and-the-diamonds style. He soon returns to making out with the demon. John Winchester is very pointedly not looking in their direction. He stands. “I have a bid.”

“Oh?” Ploutos asks. “Any other takers?”

A Vetala, a ghoul, a vampire, and the phalanx of black-suited demons (sans their leader, who is still making out) all raise their hands. John looks around in a panic at his competition. 

“Dead man’s blood,” offers the vampire. “Twelve gallons. Fourteen live fangs.”

“Interesting,” Ploutos murmurs.

“Trickster blood,” yells a Rusalka, standing and dropping water onto the floor. “This I can offer!”

“Diamonds,” offers the Vetala, spreading dark long-nailed hands. “And gold. Name your price.”

“My firstborn,” offers the ghoul. 

“Now _that_ I’ll consider,” Ploutos waggles his eyebrows and straightens up, and he’s _definitely_ larger now. “Going once?”

“Three human souls,” says the leader of the black-suited demons, breaking off from his boytoy finally and wiping lipstick from his mouth.

“Mmm, but the first-born is freely-given,” Ploutos remarks. “More valuable that way. I don’t want your chattel souls.”

The demons murmur. 

“And, mm, you missed a spot of lipstick there - there - yes.”

“My soul,” John calls out.

The room falls silent.

Ploutos stares at him. “A living human’s soul?” he asks. “You’d give it?” He narrows his eyes, draws his ringed fingers together. “Now or at the time of your death?”

John hesitates. All eyes of the room are on him. “Now,” he says finally. “You can take me. If you’ll give the gun to my elder son. Dean Aaron Winchester.”

“Oh, we can give it right to you,” Ploutos informs him with a leer. “You can live without a soul, you know. _Demons_ know.”

John looks over at the demons as if just now realising they’re demons. He swallows.

“Ah-ah-ah,” Ploutos calls, eyeing John. “No attacking the guests.”

Their black-haired demon leader steps forward. “Ahem,” he cuts in, and he has a posh British voice, “Mr. Crowley, in the flesh… of a moderately successful New York publisher. At your service, sir.” He gives a half-bow. There’s a hint of warning in his voice. “My superior, who I am here in on behalf of, would wish to be present should a soul be formally sold.”

“This doesn’t involve you,” Ploutos dismisses. “Besides, wouldn’t it take him a bit too long to find a meatsuit? A vessel?” There’s a very pointed look he gives Crowley, one John can’t make sense of at all.

Crowley swallows. “I suppose, sir.” He recovers his footing. “May I still receive a summary of the transaction in written form to present to him?”

“Of course.” Ploutos returns his attentions to John and pulls from the inside of his sleeve a long scroll and shining quill. “SOLD,” he declares, and there’s the sound of a gavel. “Samuel Colt’s mythical gun to one John Eric Winchester via payment of said John Eric Winchester’s soul.”

A roar of discontent. The rusalka lunges for John, Ploutos snaps his fingers, and she explodes into blood and flesh, splattering for several feet. Shrieks of horror.

“Now,” Ploutos says pleasantly, “To write up the sale in manner of,” he gives Crowley a nod, “A deed of gift.” He writes for a long bit, the quill scratching. “Are these terms acceptable?” He snaps his fingers and the scroll appears in John’s hands.

John stumbles back. He reads it, hanging on to it only by the fingers since it’s a magic artefact. He nods.

“Very well,” Ploutos says. “Sign in blood and the deal is done.”

“What will you use it for?” John asks, his voice weakening.

Ploutos shrugs. “Your soul? Whatever I find it is good for. Perhaps Mr. Crowley’s superior could give me some ideas… although we seem to move in different orbits. Probably for the best.”

John grits his teeth. He reaches into his pocket, finds his pocketknife missing.

“Oh! Right.” Ploutos hums. “I confiscated all weapons at moment of entry. Here,” the knife appears back in John’s pocket, alongside a second quill.

John slits the pad of his thumb, dips the quill into the wound, and writes his name without wincing.

“Done,” he says.

“Thank you kindly.” Ploutos waves a hand, and the gun appears in John’s back pocket. “Mr. Crowley, if you will?”

Crowley sighs long-sufferingly, lifts the monocle to his eye. Through its red lens, he can see John Winchester’s soul. He approaches him. John Winchester stretches his arms out as though upon a cross. Crowley stares at the glow emanating from him, the infinity folded up into this battered man. He places a hand on John’s chest and slowly slowly pulls his soul from his body. It stretches like elastic, further and further from him, about to snap into Crowley’s hand. 

And that’s when the explosion hits.

A gaping hole appears in the wall directly across from Ploutos. Crowley pulls back in surprise. John’s soul snaps back into his body. 

Meg is standing in the centre of the hole, light behind her and rubble raining down around her in a macabre halo. The auction guests rattle and howl in fright. She stands confidently, hip jutting, a bazooka tucked under one arm. Azazel’s demons back her up, far outnumbering Crowley’s squad. “Heeeeeey, Crowley,” she calls out, ignoring everything else for the moment. “How’s the Crossroads Cohort?”

“Fine,” says Crowley clippedly. “And common demons like yourself?”

A flash of anger across Meg’s face. “We’re on the up-and-up, you know,” she says nastily. “Who knows? Someday you could be working for _me_ instead of Mr. Mephistopheles. Now, I’d advise you to stand aside.” She turns her attention to John Winchester. “Hey, Johnny-boy,” she sing-songs cheerfully. “I came for the Colt. Hand it over…” she steps aside to reveal Ash, Ellen, and Jo, bound and gagged. Jo’s headscarf is gone. “Or I kill these.”

CUT. 

“Get everything together, boy,” Bobby says gruffly. “If there’s even a _chance_ \--”

“There isn’t,” Dean says dully. Even at the Impala’s top speed, they’re hours away from the Roadhouse on the AZ border.

“Lose the frown,” Bobby snaps. “We ain’t drivin’. I mean, we’re drivin’, but to somewhere else.”

“What?”

“Rufus,” Bobby says stiffly, and the way he says the name implies they have some history. “He ain’t far. Ex-military. Retired hunter, but he’s got a pilot’s license. Stodgy piece of work, but he don’t ask questions.”

“He doesn’t?”

Bobby considers. “Not if he’s too drunk to.”

Dean gapes at the prospect that Bobby has _friends_.

Bobby raises a grey eyebrow. “You comin’?”

Dean nods; he doesn’t need to be told a second time. In moments, they’re bursting out the door side-by-side, Dean pulling the Impala’s keys from his pocket. A CUT and they’re tearing out of the Salvage yard, speeding toward Rufus’s house. Dean doesn’t even bother to turn music on. He just guns it, and Bobby sits in the passenger seat, not speaking except to give directions, his brown hand turning white as it presses hard against the door. Dean drives as if his life depends on it, as if Ellen and Ash and Jo’s lives depend on it.

CUT.

Rufus’s house. Bobby somehow has a key (why on god’s green earth does he have the key to Rufus’s house? gay reasons). They knock, but when nobody answers, they walk right in. Rufus is home, but he’s passed out drunk on the couch.

“Great,” Bobby mutters, staring at his zonked-out ex. “We’re stealing the plane, then.”

“Um,” Dean swallows, “Do _you_ know how to fly it?”

Bobby shrugs. “Rufus took me for some joyrides back when we were--ahem. Yes. I can.”

CUT.

Bobby is very determinedly flying a dumpy but aerodynamic plane as Dean screams like a little bitch.

CUT. They’re at the Roadhouse.

It’s rubble. The Roadhouse is, no pun intended, ash. Not even a skeleton of the structure remains. it’s been razed to the ground as if a pillar of fire descended upon it. Blackened beams of wood stick up like filthy ribs. Bobby spares a thought for how divine wrath and demonic anger can look so alike, but Dean’s not taking time to think. The second the plane’s wheels touch down in the dust he’s racing into the ruins, no thought for his own safety, howling out for _ELLEN! JO!_

Some parts of the back rooms - parts made of reinforced concrete rather than wood - are simmering hot to the touch, but still solid. The Roadhouse safe, buried under planks of smouldering wood and half-melted nails and crispy bits of what once were god-knows-what, is intact.

“BOBBY,” Dean hollers. The old man is at his side in a heartbeat, sliding on gloves (because this ain’t his first rodeo and of course he had the presence of mind to bring them) to touch the hot metal. He knows the code instantly - Dean gives him an incredulous look. 

“Jo’s birthday,” Bobby grunts. “What? I keep track of these things.”

He reaches into the safe with his gloves, delicately removing a long piece of flame-retardant fabric.

A headscarf. Jo’s headscarf. Embroidered on one corner are six numbers. And wrapped inside it is a phone.

A flashback.

CUT.

The demons burst into the Roadhouse. Ellen reacts first, levelling a gun at the intruders and ordering Jo into the back room. Jo obeys instantly, closes and locks the door behind her, unwinds her headscarf to reveal her phone’s passcode embroidered on the inside. She rips her phone from her pocket, types words into it. Her eyes are panicked but her fingers are steady and fast. “DEMONS.”

She can hear a voice outside. We recognise it as Meg’s. “Come on, Ellen,” she says, her voice an evil simper. “We don’t want to hurt you or your children. Not yet, anyway.” Jo types faster. “COME TO CAPTURE US. ASH HAS PHONE. TRACK US FROM THIS ONE.”

She wraps her phone up in her headscarf, shoves it into the safe and locks it, hiding it under a blanket and a broken beam just as Meg kicks down the door and knocks Jo out with a plank of wood.

CUT. We’re back with Dean. He punches the six numbers into the phone, unlocks it, reads Jo’s note. “DEMONS COME TO CAPTURE US. ASH HAS PHONE. TRACK US FROM THIS ONE.” He’s not the most technologically-advanced member of planet Earth, but if Jo can do it, so can he. Soon enough, he finds an app with a map that shows a blinking signal; he zooms in and discovers that Ash, Ellen, and Jo are in New York State, not far from the town of Sleepy Hollow. 

Dean swears loudly, shares the find with Bobby. Bobby grits his teeth. And back into the plane they go.

CUT.

Sam is passed out on the floor. Dreaming.

This isn’t Jake. It’s as though her subconscious mind knows she can’t think of that now, can’t think of fire or blood or pain. It takes her back to a softer memory, a different, quieter love. It takes her back to the places that have always been her sanctuaries: libraries.

The lighting is different, romanticised, slightly blurred. Sam is young, maybe twelve years old, and John hasn’t yet forced her to cut her hair for hunting. Light gleams down its wispy dark strands. The Winchesters have camped out in the town of Sunville Kentucky and Dean and John are chasing a gang of ghouls, creatures who feed on human flesh for sustenance. Their target is the leader: a large, vicious male. They’ve posted Sam to the Sunville library, asked her to dig up all the facts on the county’s history of murder as she can find. She’s reading about a dismemberment and a rape. Once again, she’s twelve. 

“Nothing,” she’s saying, flipping over an old Coroner’s report. “Nothing, again. It’s just humans who’ve done this stuff, I think.”

“Thanks anyway, Sammy,” says Dean over the phone, clicking off the call.

Sam sighs, shuts the book, rubs fisted hands into her eyes.

“Hey,” says a small boy’s voice. “You all right?”

Sam starts, panics, sends her fist right into the boy’s face on instinct. He falls back with a shout, and Sam rushes to his side, grabbing his hand and the side of his face. “Ohmigosh,” she’s saying, “I’m so sorry-”

“Ow,” says the boy petulantly, rubbing his cheekbone. “That hurt.” He sits bolt upright, offers his hand to Sam. “I’m Rory!”

“I’m--” she knows her father always told her to use a fake name. She refuses. “I’m Sam.”

“Hi, Sam.” He smiles. “Whatcha readin’?”

Sam closes the book with a snap. “Just something for my dad. It’s gross, and I hate it.” She slaps the book with her palm as if to punish it, then winces.

“My dad makes me do gross stuff too,” the boy offers. He kicks one foot into the ground. 

Sam’s eyes widen. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

They’re kids. That’s really all it takes for them to start a friendship. Sam’s dreaming brain skims ahead, loops together a montage of their early days together. They read in the library, feet touching, and in a nearby park they carved their names into a tree trunk so that even when Sam moved away some part of them would always be together. Sometimes they held hands when they walked and Sam, who had let go of so much even at that young age, didn’t want to unlace her fingers from his, even when their palms were sweaty or sticky with juice of the popsicles Rory brought her but never ate himself. Rory wasn’t thin, but he never ate. Instead, he would whisper about his dad. And about the people who were after him, the father-and-son team who were trying to _kill_ him. And eventually Sam put the pieces together. Rory was a ghoul. Rory’s dad was the vicious ghoul leader. Rory himself never ate because his diet was human. 

Rory invited Sam to his house, just once, and she had kissed him on the mouth, not caring what that mouth had been fed. Rory hadn’t hurt anybody. He had pleaded for his father to stop, and he had been beaten for it, and he showed Sam the lines carved by a belt on his back. Sam had cried. She didn’t yet know that if not for her brother she’d have scars just like Rory. Dean had them instead.

That night, John asked Sam--demanded, really--if, after all these weeks, her research had turned up anything on where the ghoul leader might be. And Sam, faced with the most difficult decision of her life, told him.

And then sprinted as fast as she could to Rory’s house to warn him. He bolted out the back door, and she never saw him again, never knew if her father or Dean had killed him.

CUT. Sam, our Sam, opens her eyes. She’s still slumped over on the ground, but she’s no longer in her motel room.

She’s outside. Crickets chirp. It’s night. She looks up. The sky is dark, half-clouded but with a few pinpricks of light. It’s faintly windy. Rusty swings creak and creak. There’s mulch beneath her feet. She’s at a playground. It takes a moment for her to identify it. It takes a tree stump with two names on it to identify it. It’s her-and-Rory’s park. 

“Huh,” she breathes, and shivers. She turns, faces the empty playground. It’s eerie, dirty, almost abandoned. Set for demolition if the caution tape is any indication.

“This is one weird dream,” Sam murmurs. She’s had memory-dreams before, but they’ve never ended like this. She takes the metal rebars that drive the caution tape into the ground and, with a grunt, crouches and tears them up from the ground. She moves them, taking the stump with her and Rory’s name out of the area slated for demolition. She steps in mud, and doesn’t care. She kneels down in it. Looks at the names. They were at eye level for the kids, and she has to stoop heavily to see them now. Time has softened the pocketknife lines, blurred them slightly, but they’re still readable. Sam. To the left, Rory. 

A smile twitches her face.

She stands. “Okay,” she murmurs, “Time to wake up now.”

She doesn’t.

“Time to wake up now,” she tries again, squeezing every muscle in her body. She stays where she is. She tries pinching herself. Nothing. Nothing. “Wake up… NOW.” Nothing.

A streak of panic on her face. She clutches at her head. Feels for her back pocket. Her phone is still there.

Starting to think she might not be dreaming, that she might actually be in Kentucky, she dials Dean.

CUT.

“Sam,” Dean says, trembling in the plane cockpit. “You good?”

“I think,” Sam says, “I think, um. I think I… I don’t know what happened. But um, if this isn’t a dream… I’m in Kentucky.”

“What?!”

“I don’t know. I fell asleep in Wyoming and I dreamed about, about a playground in Kentucky, and now it seems I’m - I’m here.” 

“Sam?”

“This isn’t a dream, is it?” An edge of hysteria to Sam’s voice. “Please tell me this isn’t a dream.”

“Dude, if it’s a dream I’m in it too,” Dean assures her. “And Bobby. And I don’t think Bobby’s ever had a dream in his life.” Something processes. “Hang on, you said _Kentucky_?!”

“Yeah. Remember when you and Dad hunted the ghouls?”

“And you were useless in the library for fourteen days,” Dean snorts. “Yeah, I remember. Wait, you’re _there_?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“Can you, like… get back?”

“I don’t know!” Sam, back in Kentucky, throws her hands into the air. “I don’t KNOW, Dean! I just teleported, I guess, and I’m freaking the FUCK OUT!” 

“Whoa, whoa. Do you think you were drugged?”

Sam’s face switches to fear instantly. “Um.” She looks around, pats herself all over her body. “Probably not?”

“Then…?” Dean jerks his chin, eyebrows up, incredulous.

“I DON’T KNOW!” In a fit of anger, Sam ends the call. Dean, in the plane, promptly returns to screaming like a little bitch.

Sam bites her lip. It’s a long shot, but maybe…. 

She dials Meg.

CUT.

Ploutos splutters, staring at Meg and all the demons around her . “You can’t just--”

Meg’s demons teleport to him, tackle him town. He thrashes, shedding gold sparks, then goes still. Meg raises her eyebrows. “John…? The Colt? I’m waiting?”

John reaches into his back pocket and grasps the gun in one hand. “No.”

Meg cocks her head. “Alright.” She jerks her head and one of her demons shoves Ash forward. He removes the gag from his mouth, and Ash spits at him.

Meg slips past the demon and places a hand posessively on Ash’s arm, lifting a knife to his chin. She drags it down to his adam’s apple. “Last words?”

Ash takes a careful breath. Casts pleading eyes at John Winchester. Deliberately, he looks at the restrained Jo, kicking and thrashing, screaming through the gag. The knife presses in.

“Doctor Badass… out,” Ash manages, and Meg carves into his jugular.

He crumples to the ground.

CUT.

Meg’s phone rings.

She answers it, holding up a hand to silence the crowd, and puts Sam on speaker. Ash makes choking noises, blood bursting out of his throat. 

“Meg?” It’s Sam’s worried voice. Across the room, John’s head snaps up.

“Hello, Samantha,” Meg says, her voice instantly kind. She drops her eyes to the spasming Ash. “Oh, ignore the background noises; there’s a bit of a party. You doin’ okay?”

“I think I’ve just teleported to Kentucky.” 

“Oh, I hate it when that happens. Listen, I’m a little busy. Call you back, okay? Oh wait,” she snaps her fingers, “One more thing. Do you feel like you were completely abandoned and failed by your dad?” She holds the phone out in John’s direction to make sure he hears Sam’s reply. A demon slams a hand over his mouth so he can’t say anything.

Back in Kentucky, Sam blinks at the question. “Um. That kind of came out of the blue. But… yeah. I mean, every day, if you want the truth. He took off. Left Dean alone, so he had to track me down. Um, my boyfriend died and nobody was really there for me on that, probably the time in my life I’ve needed help more than any other time, like, ever!” Her voice is a tad hysterical, and she calms it. “Um. I’ve been calling him for days, Dean’s been calling him for days, and he hasn’t replied. The last thing I texted him was that I need him, and he didn’t say shi--anything. I guess… he could be dead. And if he’s not dead, he… might as well be.” She blows air in a raspberry out from between her lips. “I mean, you’ve been nicer than he’s been.”

Meg, covered in Ash’s blood, smiles at John. “Is that so?”

“Yeah.” Sam sighs, releases a small chuckle. “Anyway, um, take care, Meg. Sorry to bother you. And thanks for the, for the snacks.”

She hangs up.

The demon releases John and Meg stares at him, absolutely eating up his reaction. Blood has clumped into Ash’s mullet. Jo is trying to scream. Ellen is perfectly still.

“So,” Meg says, “After that fun little intermission. Are you going to give me the Colt, or am I going to kill this darling little lamb and her mother even slower than I killed Ash? I could do it limb by limb, you know. I’ve had practice.”

Ellen has worked herself out of her ropes enough to catch at Jo’s hands. Her eyes, when she meets John’s, plead for Jo’s life.

John composes himself and fingers the completely smooth, silver gun, puts his hands all over it. An unidentifiable expression flashes across his face.

“I’ll give it to you,” John says coldly. “The Colt. It’s the only thing that can kill your leader.”

“Correct,” Meg confirms with a grin. “Hand the fucker over.” 

John grits his teeth. “First, call off your demons. All of them. And,” he indicates Ellen and Jo, “Let them go.”

“Why should I?”

“You _really_ need the gun. And,” he gestures, “I’m trapped in here anyway.”

Meg looks around, sees that he’s correct. “Fine.” She jerks her head, and, one by one, her demons teleport out. The last two slowly free Jo and Ellen. They fall into each other, Ellen clinging to Jo, both of them sobbing. Meg rolls her eyes. “Gun. Now.”

“Fine.”

John tosses it to her. She grabs it out of the air. Grins, caresses it. Levels it at John. Pulls the trigger.

Glitter shoots out of the barrel.

Meg stares at it in disbelief. “WHAT?!”

Ploutos recovers. He staggers to his feet, small once again, and re-opens every entrance he had previously sealed shut. “AUCTION CANCELLED,” he shrieks, and thrusts his hand out, forcibly propelling Meg out the way she’d come and instantly repairing the wall behind her. Supernatural (hehe) creatures run helter-skelter, scream, panic, bump into each other, panic some more, run out the wrong doors in their haste to escape, run back in, and then run back out the right doors this time. Chaos, hullabaloo. Chairs and tables topple like dominos.

Finally, it’s only Ellen, Jo, John, Crowley, and Ploutos, shell-shocked in a completely trashed room. Fragments of the ceiling are drifting to the floor. Ash’s body lies still on the red carpet. 

“What happened there?” Ploutos finally asks.

“It wasn’t the real Colt,” John says heavily. “It was smooth all over. The real Colt has part of a Psalm etched into the barrel.”

Ploutos turns red as a tomato. “I WAS SELLING FALSE MERCHANDISE?”

John shrugs. “Someone might have stolen it right out from under your nose.” There’s only one person he knows who could have done that, and he feels rage build.

“Well,” Ploutos says, in a huff. “The contract is void.” He pulls up the document wherein John sold his soul in exchange for the Colt, courtesy of Ploutos. No Colt courtesy of Ploutos, no soul-selling, and the contract bursts into flames.

“Well,” sighs Crowley. “I suppose that’s it for me. Ta!” 

He vanishes. 

John gets to his feet. “Ellen,” he says. “Jo.”

“Hey,” says Jo weakly.

Ellen greets him stiffly. “John.” The car John rented for his trip to the auction is trashed, and they’re miles and miles and miles away in the woods at night. “We have no way back.”

“They’ll find us,” says Jo, putting on a brave face. “Dean’s gonna find us.” She gingerly touches Ash’s body, rolls him onto his side, pulls his phone from his pocket with a chapped and trembling hand. “This tracked us. Ash has had it since the Roadhouse was attacked.”

A silence. Then Jo adds, “It’s all we have left of him now.”

They gather him up, hold him, remove him from the room. Ploutos watches them go, then clucks his tongue at the blood on the floor. “So wasteful.” With a wave of his hand, he erases it. CUT and we’re with Ellen and Jo and John bearing Ash up from the ground. As soon as they leave the auction room and close the door behind them, it’s once more a weathered, ancient stone church. No sign of magic. The cold sets in.

Bluntly, Jo starts to cry. Ash was like her brother. This is the first sibling relationship to come undone. Ellen grieves in her own way, but doesn’t let it show on her face. 

“I have to go,” John says gruffly. Jo raises her tear-streaked cheeks. Ellen just stares at him. John shakes his head, guilty, heavy, and strides away into the woods. “JOHN,” Ellen yells after him. “JOHN!” But a shivering Jo stops her from pursuing him. She returns to her daughter and holds her.

The family of two huddles for warmth in the weathered church as flakes of snow begin to fall. There’s the distant noise of an airplane, and some time later, Dean and Bobby come crunching out of the woods. “JO!” Dean screams, face open with relief, then immediately composes himself and nods suavely. Jo rushes to him and buries herself in his chest. Bobby enfolds Ellen. 

The snow drifts down around them.

CUT.

Sam shivers, alone at night, in rural Kentucky. She has another of Meg’s energy bars in her pocket and she pulls it out to snack on, arms locked around her knees, gooseflesh all over her body, chilled. She leans against the stump. She finishes the bar, says a prayer, drops her head to her chest, and sleeps. And in an instant, she vanishes.

CUT.

Ash’s body won’t fit in the plane, and they have to leave him, waxy and stiffening, out in the forest. They don’t have shovels, so he is buried in a shallow hole, covered in snow. Not far from the church. At least within the periphery of what was once hallowed ground. Jo closes his eyes and prays for him while Dean stands uncomfortably and Ellen lets precisely one tear fall. Bobby keeps his arm around her shoulder.

CUT.

In the airplane, after Jo and Ellen have alternated in relating the story of the auction, of the Colt, of John. Dean’s face when he learns that his father turned tail and headed into the woods again: he’s not grief-stricken. More resigned. But at a look from Jo he smiles. He’s lent her John’s leather jacket to cover her head with; nobody has anything better.

“I want to see the Roadhouse,” Jo says. She shifts uncomfortably. The plane is too small to fit everyone; they’re in a tangle of limbs. But they’re still within safe weight; hunters and their allies are usually muscular but thin, physically fit but unhealthy, not a lot of meat on their bones. 

“It’s been levelled,” Bobby says gruffly.

Jo stares at him flatly, brown eyes fierce. There is no deliberation. “I want to see the Roadhouse,” she repeats, her tapered hands clenched. “We’re stopping at the Roadhouse.”

“Nothing’s left…” Dean warns.

Jo glares at him. “How did you feel when you lost _your_ home in a fire?”

Dean goes quiet. It’s just the sound of the airplane’s propellers.

“I searched for everything I could find,” Dean murmurs. And then, perhaps off an echo of Cassie’s words, “Sorry, Jo.”

CUT.

The plane is landing in the desert, in view of the Roadhouse’s wreckage. Dust flees from under the metal behemoth as it coats and comes to a jerky stop. Jo has no tears left to cry, and she marches toward the Roadhouse, plants her feet outside it, stares at the heat waves emanating from the ash. And then gasps.

“Dean,” she says, half-turning. “Mom. Bobby.”

They join her, and stare.

Sitting in the middle of the burnt-out building, in the exact same position she fell asleep against the stump, is Sam. 

“Sam?” Dean asks. Then he yells it. “Sam?!”

She opens her eyes. Shakes her dark shaggy hair out of her eyes. Jumps to her feet. “OH! Hot! Hot hot hot eek ow hot--” and then, very earnestly, “Damn!” She hops jumps and bounces out of the rubble and looks around. “Where am I?”

“How did you get here?” Dean counters.

Sam throws her hands into the air. “Dude, I don’t know!”

“I thought you were in Kentucky.”

“I WAS!” Sam can feel a panic attack coming on and she forces it down with an iron nerve. “I was. And then I closed my eyes, and… I was here.” She tilts her head to the side. “Actually, I think I thought of the Roadhouse right before I closed my eyes. Musta drifted off. And… sleepwalked?”

“From Kentucky?” Dean asks.

“You got a better explanation?!” There’s still Kentucky mud on Sam’s jeans. “Oh, hey Bobby. Sweet airplane.”

“H.” Bobby coughs. “Hey.”

Sam turns her attention to Ellen and Jo. Bobby halfheartedly throws holy water at her, which Sam flinches at, causing a ripple of concern. But there’s no hissing or howl of pain; she’s clean. Just slightly impained.

“Hey,” Sam gripes, wiping it off her arms. “Warn a girl. And that stings!” She blows air out from between her lips, then notices the absence of Ash, then connects the shell of the building behind her to the Roadhouse. Then sees how beaten down Dean looks. 

“Where’s Ash?” she asks. “The Roadhouse… did you get the Colt? What happened?”

Off their grieving faces, we CUT.

An attractive woman in sunglasses, not one we’ve seen before, tears down an England highway in a red Corvette convertible, wind blowing her hair out behind her. She has the Colt, the real Colt, in her lap, and she smugly caresses it. She’s listening to the radio (Pink by GIRLI, her personal anthem), gesturing vibrantly and singing loudly along, the picture of a sun-kissed bitch who can do whatever the hell she wants. She stole the Colt and she thinks she’s _awesome._

BLACKOUT. 

End Credits music: a continuation of Pink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you can guess who crowley's boytoy is BEFORE you look at [the picture of them](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S8ZPdnHw08FuAX3k3AlLn9mBXHW4Ad-G/view?usp=sharing), i'll name one of azazel's special children after you.
> 
> artist credit is important!! the makers i've used to help conceive my characters are [here](https://picrew.me/image_maker/391245), [here](https://picrew.me/image_maker/152665), and [here](https://picrew.me/image_maker/626602).


	7. CORINTHIANS.

**THE PATH TO HERE.**

Set to the first minute of ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’ by the Hollies, an oddly loving but melancholic song. The Winchester house burning, a cut and it’s Jake this time; the Impala, the escape, which is when the lyrics “The road is long, with many a winding turn” hits. The song fades under Dean’s voice:  _ The thing that killed mom… he said it was a demon.  _ Then Dean’s voice:  _ We have to find Dad.  _ A cut and it’s Margaret Ruth Masters, long-haired and laughing. A cut and she’s thrashing, panicking as she’s invaded and violated by the demon who takes her name. Sam’s burgeoning psychic ability, turning the knob in the shower; then larger things, the energy bars and her subsequent teleportation in her sleep. Three brief shots of Sam and Meg together, Meg playing the role of a comforting friend, Sam opening up about Jake. Then Ash’s whisper of the unholy name Azazel, the demons summoned at the sound of the name. Ash’s death at Meg’s hand. The auction, a gleaming gun, and John’s voice:  _ It’s the only thing that can kill your leader.  _ The false Colt. The glitter.

And we fade back to the story.

The Colt thief, as some of you have guessed, is none other than Bela Talbot. She’s middle-aged, sleek, confident; she dresses like she’s much younger because she knows she’s hot shit. As we open up on her, she smirks to herself and flicks a sun-lit manicured hand through her silvered hair.

With her other hand, she turns the steering wheel. She’s roaring down a highway in her Corvette convertible, tailed by trucks and taxis in hot pursuit; zoom in on them, and we see that each has a demon driver. One demon drives down the opposite lane, aiming to collide head-on. Bela swerves hard, cutting it fine; her driving skills rival Dean’s. Cursing, she swings the Corvette onto an exit, skids, rights herself, guns it.

She lifts a flask from the cupholder, takes a small sip, then pops in a stick of bubble gum. A slight look of irritation as her phone goes off.

“Hello?” she asks the Unknown Number. She answers unknown numbers because she doesn’t fear the devil or god. It’s John Winchester.

“Why did you steal the Colt?” he asks icily, without preamble.

Bela scoffs and snaps her gum, avoiding another car trying to hit her. “You just hate to see a girlboss winning.”

A pause.

“I don’t know what a girl boss is.”

“Because you’re a misogynist, duh.”

A pause. “Bela, you have no idea how important that gun is.”

“God, you’re so American.” Bela rolls her eyes, breaks sharply, and careens over a border ditch, aiming to get back on the freeway.

“Bela-”

“Please.” Bela scoffs and spins the wheel one-handed. “Even if I did know, I don’t  _ care _ . Because here are my plans. I’m gonna call my wife, I’m gonna go home to my kid, I’m gonna bully him into eating a vegetable, I’m gonna to melt this little toy into slag, and I’m not gonna spare you a single  _ thought _ .” A pause. “You thot.”

Close-up on Bela pressing hard on the accelerator. Foot fetishists dni I just wanted to point out she’s wearing hot pink stilettos with real knives in them, and the knives are also pink. 

“You can’t do that,” John snaps.

“Call you a thot?”

“Destroy the gun.”

“Hmmm. Interesting claim. As it turns out, yes I can.”

“You couldn’t even if you wanted to.”

Bela groans, crashing through a flimsy barrier with a massive SCREECH-CRUNCH and coolly dodging a bullet a red-eyed demon fires from behind her. “John, John, I am nowhere near as incompetent as you believe.”

“Don’t destroy it.” Bela has known John on-and-off for years; his voice is as close to desperate as she’s ever heard it. 

“And why not?” Another snap of gum. “I can do whatever I  _ want _ , John.” She picks up the gun and dangles it barrel-first between two fingers. “Why shouldn’t I wreck this little thing?”

“It’s the only thing that can kill…” John doesn’t name the demon. “The thing that killed my,” he swallows, “My wife. The thing that wants to… kill,” this part isn’t quite true, “My daughter.”

“Oh? Kill your daughter?” Bela gasps in mock shock. “I didn’t know you cared for your children! When did this spring up? How novel.”

A familiar silver truck grinds down the highway behind her, overtaking her other pursuers. Meg.

“I care about my kids more than anything.” John’s voice is dark. He  _ means _ it.

“Then why--”

“They are safer  _ without me _ , Bells.”

“Don’t call me that,” Bela snaps. She thinks over his words as another bullet zips over her head. “That’s probably true, actually.”

“Don’t destroy the gun!” John repeats. He softens his voice. “I’m not lying, Bela. This is the only thing that can stop him. I know what he’s planning--well, I know some of it. And it’s big. I  _ need _ to shut him  _ down _ . Do you know what he wants with Sam? Because-”

John keeps talking, but frustratingly, we’re on Bela; we can’t hear exactly what John knows, only that Bela flicks up an eyebrow in reaction. “Sorry, mate,” she returns. “A whore’s a whore and a deal’s a deal, and I have a big reward coming in for destroying this… trinket.”

“It’s not just my wife and daughter,” John says in a rush. “It’s countless people. House fires, murders--”

“Ohmigod, John, what part of ‘I don’t care’ do you not understand?!”

“You’re in England, aren’t you? On the M-65? Tailed by demons?” He speaks quickly. “And one of them has short blonde hair, a choker, jet black eyes. That’s his lieutenant. First mate to the demon I’m after. She calls herself Meg, and she’s lethal. She’d never trust you to destroy the gun on your own. She’ll kill you to destroy it herself.”

Bela checks her rearview mirror. One of the demons pursuing her does match that description. “Look who’s a clever boy!”

“Bela, I need this gun.”

“Gun, gun, gun!” Bela mimics his voice. “You probably voted red last election.”

CUT and we’re with John. He’s on an airplane not far from touching down in Heathrow. He knows where Bela lives and aims to intercept her there. 

“Bela, I’m desperate,” he admits, and his face looks old, far older than it is. “Please. Take my life, all my money, take anything.  _ Anything _ , Bela. I  _ need _ to kill,” a careful look around him, “Azazel.”

Once again, the name sends out a ripple to his black-eyed demonic followers. Meg takes a moment to deliberate, then releases the steering wheel, vanishing. Her truck spins off the road. 

John invoked Azazel; it’s as effective as a summoning spell. His followers arrive where the word was said. However, as John’s on an airplane moving at 586 mph, the demons manifest in the air where John  _ used _ to be a second ago, and then all plummet into the Atlantic Ocean screaming.

_ AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH _

The passengers in the airplane look around. One of them turns to John. “Y’all hear sum’n?”

The screams fade out. A few of the stronger demons, including Meg, manage to teleport themselves to shore unharmed, landing with a roll. Meg curses and pushes sand off her clothes, muttering “Coarse, rough, irritating, and it gets everywhere.” She pops away to chase Bela again.

Bela, who is detouring WIDE to prevent any of the demons to find out where she and her son live. She crests a hill and vanishes from our view. As she drives, time passes fast; the sun slides like a runny egg yolk toward evening in the sky. We zoom up as though flying and see the landscape spread out below:; it’s green, partially forested, expansive. It’s beautiful without being close or commercial or dirty, but it’s still carved in half by a loud freeway.

A CUT and an exhausted Bela has finally lost all the demons except a (very pissed-off) Meg. Bela pulls up to her salt-encircled palatial mansion, tosses her car keys to her unquestioning velvet-clad valet, and on tired legs she marches up the sweeping stairs to her house.

She walks in the front door.

Instead of finding her son, she finds John Winchester.

Bela narrows her eyes.

OBLIGATORY SUPERNATURAL TITLE SEQUENCE. THEME SONG: “SEPTEMBER” BY EARTH WIND AND FIRE. JAZZY MONTAGE OF MARY WINCHESTER DYING, NOW WITH AN ADDED WILHELM SCREAM  _ AND _ A TRAP BEAT.

_ A card that reads THREE HOURS EARLIER... _

The gang is back at Singer Salvage. A grainy, staticky Bad Moon on the Rise floats off Bobby’s stereo.  _ Don’t go out tonight; it’s bound to take your life. There’s a bad moon on the rise… _

“Ash is dead,” Sam says, as if trying to convince herself of it. She saw him yesterday. She takes a sip of beer.

The hunters and semi-hunters are in Bobby’s dusty living room, Ellen and Bobby tucked on chairs, Sam in a stool, Jo cross-legged on a table, Dean manspreading on a desiccating sofa. 

“Yes,” says Jo quietly. “He said--the name. Of the demon. And its followers came.”

“Balls,” Bobby curses.

“To the Roadhouse,” Ellen picks up. “And Jo - saved her phone, wrapped it up before we were captured. A woman, a demon, she took us. To John. To this, to the - the auction you mentioned, the Goblin Market.”

“Took you,” Dean says. “Like, teleported?”

“Yes,” Jo tells him.

“So like Sam.”

“Stop,” Sam groans. 

Dean stares at Sam, who is on the defensive. He raises a hand, then drops it, then raises it, then drops it. “You  _ teleported _ , Sam.”

Sam shrugs. “Tell me about it.”

“But, like, how. Dude, what the hell.”

“I don’t know.” Sam’s voice is flat. She has clearly been over this. Multiple times. “What happened then, Ellen?”

“The demon-woman - took us. Teleported us, right in front of John. And said that unless John handed over the Colt - which can kill her leader - she’d kill us one by one.”

Sam’s eyes are wide in horror. “And she got Ash.”

“Murderer,” Jo spits, as if that’s the worst slur, the most  _ vile _ word she can think of. And perhaps it is. “Fucking  _ murderer _ .”

“And then?” 

Ellen does not want to talk about it, but she won’t thrust the brunt of storytelling on her daughter. “And then John handed the Colt to the demon, but it wasn’t the real gun.”

Sam narrows her eyes. “Did he know it wasn’t the real gun when he handed it over?”

A silence. Ellen hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t know,” she admits. “Jo?”

Jo shrugs.

“Why does it matter?” Dean snaps. “You two are alive and well. That’s good.”

Jo looks down.

Ellen purses her lips. “Any more questions?”

Dean flicks up a hand sarcastically. “If demons do teleportation, would you call it Hell-eportation?” he asks. Nobody laughs, and he winces.

“Dean,” Bobby mutters. “Read the damn room.  _ Balls _ .”

“I bet Dad knew the gun was fake,” Sam remarks. “If he had the real gun he would have held onto it, let you both die.”

“Sam, you  _ know _ that’s not true,” Dean snaps, anger surging into every fibre of his muscle.

Sam stands and stomps across the floor to Dean, hitting every squeaky floorboard with a vengeance. “Our father is an  _ obsessed bastard _ .”

Dean stands, fists clenched.“No he ain’t!”

“And you never saw it because he’s obsessed with guns and violence and cars and killing and all of those things are  _ you _ .”

“SHUT UP!” Dean shoves Sam by the shoulders, sends her stumbling backward three feet. She pulls in on herself, arms up in a reflexive guard.

There’s quiet. Dean’s outburst has stunned them.

“See?” Sam asks, voice bitter.

“Did anyone try the salad?” Jo cuts in tentatively. “I thought the salad was lovely—”

“Shut up, Jo,” Dean snaps, and drops back down.

Jo glares.

“So,” Sam says, delicately retaking her seat on the stool, “Can we… get back on track? The Colt. Someone stole it.” She lays it out like a pre-school teacher. “And Dad’s going after the person who stole it, and we ought to go after Dad—”

“Think he knows who stole it?” Bobby asks quickly. He clearly wants to change the subject too.

“We can check through his contacts,” Ellen suggests. “And mine.”

“Think there’ll be one labelled Colt Thief in bright red letters?” Dean bursts out. He slams a fist against the wall. “Face facts, it’s hopeless.”

“‘It’s hopeless’ is an opinion, not a fact,” Sam points out, 20% more bitchily than is strictly necessary.

“Hang on.” Bobby holds his hand up. “Hang on. John’s a hunter, yeah?”

“No shit,” snaps Dean. “No _ shit _ , Bobby.”

“Well, it narrows things down somewhat, is all. The thief operates within Hunter communities.”

“And…?”

“Well. Rufus knows more about it than I do - old curmudgeon’s so ancient he’s met practically everyone--”

Ellen smirks. “Bobby, he’s like two years older than you--”

“Hush.” Bobby is thoughtful for a moment, his brown eyes receding into the wrinkles of his face. “Rufus was robbed once; he told me about it. Blonde woman, he said. Young to middle-aged. He saw her sneaking out the back with a cursed object tucked under her arm--before you ask, I think it was ballet shoes. He aimed a gun at her, swore on his life he hit her right in the chest. She fell, then got up and kept on going.” He huffs a laugh. “Personally, I think he missed.”

Dean folds his arms. “And you think this woman who robbed Rufus like once is the same woman who stole the Colt?” 

“He’s not the only one she’s stolen from. If Rufus wasn’t talkin’ bull that day, this superhuman burglar, whoever she is, hits almost all the active hunters. Steals their shit right out from under their noses, prob’ly fences it later to god-knows-who.”

“God-knows- _ whomst _ ,” Jo corrects.

Dean raises an eyebrow. “Must be some sort of creature.”

“Seems human; Rufus’s place has wards and salt out the yazoo, and neither that nor sunlight has ever kept ’er out.” 

“A hunter, then,” Ellen offers.

“Pretty damn far from a hunter. Object trafficker, I’d guess. And near impossible to trace.”

“Great,” sighs Dean, “So even if we do know who stole the Colt, we’re  _ still  _ at square one.”

“Not necessarily,” Bobby grouses. “Lemme call up Rufus, see what else he knows. He’s a vindictive rascal, I’ll tell you that. I once accidentally nicked a shirt of his and he--”

“Waitwait, how’d you  _ accidentally _ steal a shirt?” Sam asks, perplexed.

“Oh, I mistakenly put it on after…” Bobby clears his throat. “Anyway. Rufus tracked me halfway across the country to get it back. If anyone could hunt down this robber, it’s him.”

“Or Ash,” Jo says quietly.

“I’m sorry, Jo,” Bobby murmurs, and he turns to give her a hug, which she gratefully accepts. Dean watches the interaction guardedly, wondering how a surge of affection like that - between two people who might even know each other that well - can even work. He twists his lip. “At some point,” he cuts in, hoping Jo and Bobby will break apart, “We gotta deal with Sam being fucking Nightcrawler over here.”

Sam rolls her eyes. “What if we tried calling John?”

“He doesn’t want you a part of this,” says Ellen sharply. “And maybe he’s right, too.” She exchanges a look with Bobby. 

“You’re overprotective,” Jo accuses. “We’re all adults here. These are our lives, and you can’t protect us from the world forever.”

“It’s my _ job _ to, honey.”

Jo shakes her head, lips tight. “That’s not even a possible task.”

Ellen’s voice drops. It’s aching, regretful. “I know.”

Jo’s gaze is direct and clear when she meets her mother’s eyes. “Mom, it’s not your job to protect me from the world. It’s your job to teach me how to survive it.”

“You deserve better than just surviving it.” Ellen straightens her shoulders. “I’m not sending you out there, and that’s final.”

Jo lashes out. “Fine, but you have no control over Sam and Dean!” 

“That’s  _ right _ !” Dean half-yells. “He’s our dad.  _ We’re _ going after him.” 

“I’ll call Rufus,” Bobby says gruffly.

“I’ll check Dad’s journal,” Sam offers.

“No!” Dean blurts.

They turn to look at Dean.

“I’ll do it,” he says.

Sam gives him a perplexed look. “Why don’t we just… do it together? If one of us misses something, maybe the other will catch it.”

“I can search Bobby’s archives,” Ellen proposes.

“Hold up,” Dean holds up a hand, “I thought only Bobby and Missouri know how that system works.”

“That’s true,” admits Ellen. “I haven’t mastered it, but he’s been teaching me.”

“He’s been…” Dean processes this, bumping it around in his brainpan. “Teaching you. His library… system.”

“Yes.”

“Anything else he’s been, uh, teaching you?”

Ellen stares him down, then leaves the room to head down to the book vault without another word. 

“Dean, I’m just curious, have you ever heard of friendship?” Sam asks.

“Um, yeah?” Dean flaps his hand in Jo’s direction. “Jo and I are friends.”

Jo flip-flops a hand noncommittally. “Eeeeeeeh…….”

Dean gapes at her. “Seriously?”

Jo shrugs. 

“Well…” he turns to Sam, “You and I are friends.”

“We’re siblings, so it doesn’t count. Plus, up until a week ago I had your number blocked,” Sam points out.

Dean sighs. “Look, I’ve had friends. I had a ‘friend’ named Lisa.”

“Have you had friends you didn’t fuck?”

“Yes.” Dean says. “The dudes.  _ Obviously _ .”

“Okay, who?”

Bobby rescues Dean from having to answer this.

“What did Rufus say?”

Bobby sighs. “After dropping enough F-bombs to fill a swear jar the size of Mt. Everest-”

“Awesome-”

“That we should…” Bobby coughs lightly, “Return his… airplane.”

Sam pales. “Oh, we forgot to-”

“We forgot to-”

“Yeah. Yeah, we. Yeah.”

“We forgot to return the  _ entire _ -”

“The entire plane. We. Yeah.”

“Yeah. We- yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“The plane.”

“Yeah.”

“The whole plane.”

“Yeah.”

“The complete and total plane.”

“Yeah.”

“Having a normal one!” Sam remarks to nobody. Everyone nods in agreement.

“Rufus  _ also _ said,” Bobby adds, “That the thief is a woman named Bela Talbot, code name Lugosi, and she apparently lives in a _ very _ well-guarded, I quote, ‘Bullshit Mansion’ in Stoppersfield, England.”

“Fantastic,” Dean mutters dryly. “Sam can teleport us there.”

“No,” Bobby says calmly. “Rufus will drive over and fly us. Says we owe him major, but he’ll fly us. Well, fly you. I can’t hunt anymore,” he indicates his blown-out knee, “So I’m staying back.” As Dean reacts, he preemptively explains himself. “You  _ know _ I’d do anything for you kids. But I’m too old to fight. I’ll be researching how to kill this demon, picking up where Ash, rest and bless him, left off. If we kill it, lay this whole mess to rest, who knows. John might…” Bobby sighs. “He was my friend once. But he ain’t been the same since your mother died.”

Dean nods grimly. “I know.”

“I’ve never known him any different,” Sam points out in a small voice.

An awkward silence. “We need a nickname,” Bobby says nonsequitorially. “We can’t address the demon by its proper name, or we summon all his goddamn minions.”

“Yellow-eyes,” Sam suggests.

“Yellow-eyes,” Dean echoes. “Sure.”

Bobby nods. He turns, crosses to a dusty desk, picks up a book, the Key of Solomon, and hands it to Sam. “Here,” he says gruffly, “Take this. Rite of Exorcism is bookmarked. Could come in handy.” He gives himself a private silence. “Wish I could have had this for Missouri.” Then he rallies. “Remember, a bullet won’t stop a demon. It’ll only slow it down.”

“How’d you kill Missouri, then?” Dean asks bluntly. 

“Dean!” Sam hisses.

Bobby takes the question in stride. “I had to incapacitate the body. That means cut off the limbs. Then burn it with the demon still kicking and twitching under her skin. Knowing she was in there feeling all of it. That’s the way possession works, you know. They feel all of it.” Sam winces, but Dean is impassive. Bobby indicates the Key of Solomon. “That should prevent y’all from havin’ to do that.”

“Thank you, Mr. Singh.” Sam clutches the book to her chest. “And I’m very sorry.”

Bobby rolls his eyes. “BALLS! How many times do I have to tell you, idjit? Bobby,  _ please _ .” 

“Thanks,” Dean adds.

Sam pipes up again. “While we’re gone, be careful, alright?”

“I will if you will, Sam.” Bobby resists the urge to hug them both. “You two go find your Dad. And when you do, you bring him around, would you? I won’t even try to shoot him this time.”

Before Sam or Dean can answer, there’s the sound of a car arriving. Bobby chuckles. “That’ll be Rufus, right on time. ELLLLLLEN!”

Ellen’s holler from downstairs. “COMING!”

“I wish  _ I _ could go,” Jo grumps.

“What, is staying with me such a curse? Come on, I’ll teach you,” Bobby waves his hands, “The ways of the Men of Letters!”

“Men?” Jo wrinkles her nose. “Ew.”

Bobby laughs, then turns to Sam and Dean again, giving them a warm smile. “Have a safe flight, kids.” And Bobby gives in to his urge and hugs them. Dean squirms.

“Okay  _ but _ ,” Sam says, breaking away to look at the plane out the window. “There is no way in  _ hell _ Rufus is getting all of us, in  _ that _ ,” she points out the window to the plane, “To England.”

CUT. They’re in England.

They groan and stretch and collapse onto the ground. Ellen groans, Rufus promptly leans his head on the cockpit dashboard and falls asleep, and Sam and Dean massage their cramping thighs. Sam shoulders a backpack containing water, some snacks, the Key of Solomon, and Ash’s Ring-Ding-Demon device.

“Duuuuude,” Dean groans, staring up at the foreign sky. It’s the first time he’s been out of the country in his life and so far he hates it because, “There’s, like, British people here.”

CUT. 

_ A card reading SEVEN HOURS EARLIER... _

“Where’s my kid?” Bela snaps. She has the Colt in her waistband and a pink pistol trained on John.

“Please,” John says, and this man who has hunted and killed and fought and punched his way out of every obstacle has met his match and he is pleading,  _ pleading _ , “Please, I need the gun.” 

Bela’s face flickers with emotions not even she could define. And in them, fear. Unexplained fear. Terror, even.

“Bells…”

“Stop,” her voice is low and dangerous. “Stop.” She pulls out the Colt, shows it to John. “Here. Look. It’s legitimate. Cross my heart.”

John stares hard. “Prove it.”

Bela purses her lips. Leans close enough to show him the etching on the barrel, holding her gun on him so he doesn’t reach out and snatch it.  _ Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. _ The gun gleams with a metallic sheen John has never seen before. There’s a subtle iridescence to it, as if it’s steel overlaid with mother-of-pearl. When it hits the light streaming in from Bela’s windows, it looks unearthly. 

It’s proof enough. 

Bela purses her lips. Leans close enough to show him the etching on the barrel, holding her gun on him so he doesn’t reach out and snatch it.  _ Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. _ The gun gleams with a metallic sheen John has never seen before. There’s a subtle iridescence to it, as if it’s steel overlaid with mother-of-pearl. When it hits the light streaming in from Bela’s windows, it looks unearthly. 

It’s proof enough. 

Bela shifts. John reaches. Instead of handing the Colt over, she hits John in the head with it. Hard. 

As John reels back, Bela hits him again, again, and as John blacks out, blood seeping into his dark hair, we CUT.

Bela is frantic, calling any authorities she can reach, ransacking the bottom floor of her house, searching for her son. The sun shifts in the sky and still she turns up nothing. “Crossroads,” she mutters, knowing what she can summon there. But the nearest dirt crossroads is hours away. 

CUT and she’s in her car again. CUT and she’s miles away. CUT and she sees those same demons on the roads, pulls a complete u-turn, speeds back to her house. A second car-chase. Bullets, screeching tires, the whole deal. Meg in pursuit. Bela with teeth gritted, eye makeup smearing. Two bullets whiz: one hits. Flat tire. She keeps on driving, slower now. Hours have passed since she knocked John out with the butt of the Colt. She’s tied him up. Upon entering, she notices with satisfaction that he still hasn’t wormed his way out of his restraints.

“Where’s my kid,” Bela snaps.

“I need the Colt.”

Bela jerks her head. She has one option left.

CUT.

Bela stares upward. There’s a pentagram, a Devil’s Trap, etched in her living room ceiling (well, etched on  _ one _ living room ceiling. She has multiple living rooms because she’s [megan thee stallion voice] classy, bougie, ratchet, sassy, moody, nasty. Anyway). 

Directly beneath the pentagram, she takes chalk, a ruler, a compass, and carefully sketches a summoning circle. Nine circles, Aristotilean elements. Soil, water, a lit candle, breath from her lungs, and her own blood dropped from the center of her palm. Which she uses to carefully write her own name followed by Azazel’s: עֲזָאזֵל.

Black smoke, laced through with yellow, sickly and flaring and bright, heaves itself out of the floor. It collects, thick, thicker, expanding like a living thing, roiling. Something like lightning flashes in it, as though it’s a storm all of its own. Facsimiles of broken wings flare and rise and then dessicate to ash, collect and attempt to flap, then fall into ash again. The room is suddenly dark, as if Azazel has sucked all light into itself.

Bela shows it the Colt. Gleaming yellow eyes, fourteen eyes, twenty eyes, a hundred eyes flicker out of the column smoke. Azazel has no vessel, no speech. No way to take the Colt, nor destroy it. 

“I got it for you,” Bela says. “Like I promised. I’ll destroy it for you. But please, help me save my son. Please.”

Azazel can do nothing, trapped within the ceiling pentagram.

“Do you promise?”

Azazel can say nothing. Its eyes blink.

“One blink for yes, two blinks for no,” she orders with an edge of hysterical laughter.

One blink. The smoke swoops up, gathers, circling, by the Devil’s Trap.

Bela nods shakily, pulls over a chair, and stands on it. With a smear of blood, she mars the pentagram, un-closing its perfect circle.

A sound like a loud exhalation, and the air itself goes tense. Azazel gathers itself into a titan pillar, bursts into flame, sends Bela flying and crashing into the corner of her room. It zooms toward her.

“No,” Bela hisses, and pulls down one of her dress sleeves, revealing a pentagram tattooed on her upper chest. “You possess me, you’re stuck in here, can never get out. Find someone else.”

Azazel pulls away from Bela, and hurtles out the window. 

Bela gets up, hesitant, shaking. Throws a rug over the summoning-circle, then stands.  
And hears the click of a cocking gun.

CUT. Close-up on Dean’s harsh face. “The Colt,” he snaps. “Now.”

Bela smiles. “I don’t think so.”

Dean shoots her in the shoulder. She goes sprawling. 

“Dean!” Sam shouts. Ellen and Rufus rush to Bela, check for a pulse. Ellen strips off her jacket, prepared to staunch the wound. The second they’re near, Bela snaps back to alertness, blood retreating into the hole in her chest. As Ellen starts, Bela twists away, spider-rolls to her feet, points the gun at Ellen’s knee. Rufus gives a shout and tackles her, sends them both tumbling the ground. Bela elbows Rufus again, again, sends her sharpest bone right into his eye. He howls, drops back, lands a punch off-center against Bela’s hip. She rolls. The Colt springs out of her hand. Ellen grabs for it, but Bela kicks her in the head with the point of her heel and she drops like a stone. Bela thrashes in Rufus’s grip, bursts free, twists and slams his head into her hardwood floor. She whirls and trains the Colt on Dean just as he snatches for it.

And suddenly, everything is still.

“Not one more step,” Bela warns.

“We need that gun,” Dean snaps. He’s in front of a window. Evening light streams in behind him, and Bela is cast in dark.

“ _ I _ need the gun,” Bela retorts. Her teeth catch the light and gleam wickedly.

“Why?!”

She tilts her head coyly. “I don’t have to tell you  _ anything _ .”

Sam, in the shadows, draws a gun of her own and aims it at Bela. Dust motes drift down around her. There’s a darkness in her eyes we haven’t seen since the night Jake died. Her voice is ragged and choked and furious. “If you shoot my brother, so help me God, I will  _ fucking end you _ .”

“No, you won’t.”

“You wanna bet on that?” Sam cocks the gun. 

Rufus decides to try something, a hand clapped over his eye, too dizzy to stand. “What if we attempted negotiating?” 

“NO,” shouts every single person in unison.

“Ellen?” Sam calls in desperation, but there’s no reply. She’s still out cold. Rufus is disabled. Dean has a gun pointed at him.

Sam has nobody. She closes her eyes.

There’s a hand on her back. Warm, broad, tanned.  _ Jake.  _ She opens her eyes.

“Don’t turn,” he murmurs. “You know I’m not really here.”

Sam nods weakly.

“Sam, think. There’s a way out of this.” Sam shakes her head. Jake won’t have it. “ _ Talk _ , love. You’re almost a lawyer; it’s what you do best. Everyone always called you a control freak growing up, remember?  _ Use that. _ You  _ can _ take control. You can wrangle this situation, ’Mantha. You’re smart. Scary-smart. You’re the best person I know. And you can do this. I promise.” And then, with a light kiss pressed to the back of her head, “I love you.”

Jake fades.

Sam thinks, and measures her breath, and exhales carefully, and comes to a conclusion.

She pockets her gun.

“There’s a demon after me,” she confesses, trying to get through to the wild, panting Bela. She lifts her hands in surrender, steps closer. Light from behind, the setting sun, frames her now; her shadow cuts an ethereal picture across the circle that just summoned Azazel.

Her voice is soft, stoic. “ _ Please _ . There’s a demon. He…” she looks at her hands and scratches a line down her palm with a fingernail. “He did something to me. He killed my mom; he killed countless people. He’s the reason my friend Ash is dead.” Bela’s face is impassive. “Please don’t be unmoved by this,” Sam beseeches, clasping her hands. “Please. That gun is the only thing that can stop him. If we don’t, he’ll kill more people. He’ll kill so many people.” Her voice drops low and cracks on the middle word. “He’ll torture me.”

Bela tilts her head back and actually laughs. “None of that is news to me, Winchester.”

“Huh?” Sam blinks. “Wait, really?”

“Yes, really. I know there’s a little demon plot, and I know that he has plans for you. And  _ I. Don’t. Care. _ ”

“What?  _ Plans _ for me?”

Bela pulls the gun on Sam and fires, aiming for a leg.

CUT.

Sam sees Bela’s finger twitch as if in slow motion. The barrel of the gun releases the bullet, kicks back into Bela’s curled palm. Sam can see the bullet moving toward her, cleaving the air, ripples of wind distortion. Fast, faster. She flings her hand out, screams, and the bullet

stops

spins

and slots itself between two of her fingers, rotating, glowing, warm.

Silence. Bela stares. Sam’s eyes are wide, terrified, staring at nothing. She closes her hand around the bullet. Stillness.

“Sam?” Dean asks tentatively. Because he could have sworn, he could have  _ sworn _ , that in the precise second Sam threw her hand up and deflected the bullet, her eyes weren’t brown but yellow.

Bright yellow.

Sam is frozen still, as if gutted. “Sam?”

Bela stares at Sam, fear in her eyes. Stares at the faintly stirring Rufus. At Dean.

Dean, who’s drawing his gun again.

Bela reacts instinctively, shoots him in the chest. 

CUT.

Dean can hear Sam’s voice as if through a haze. “Dean, Dean,” she’s repeating, her hands clammy on his shoulder, her jacket wadded up and pressed hard into the wound as he bleeds into a stranger’s floor. A shaking hand dials 911, is transferred to 999 (UK equivalent). “Dean, listen to me, stay with me, keep those eyes open, Dean, Dean, hey. Hey,” her voice is trembling. “Hey.”

She stares at Bela. Bela, who stares at the gun in her hand.

Dean’s fingers lock onto Sam’s forearm. “Get the Colt,” he grits out. “Get the Colt, Sam.”

“I need to get you to a hospital.”

“Get the Colt.”

Bela snaps back to herself, drops the Colt, and sprints out her front door.

“No.” Sam fumbles with her phone, links with the operator. “We need an ambulance. Please. My brother’s been shot. We’re in the big, um, the mansion in… Stoppersfield? Stoppersfield, England. I mean, obviously in England. I mean, please, please, he’s bleeding.” And then, “He’s bleeding out.”

“They’re not gonna get here in time.” Dean’s face is blanched. He’s right. He bats at her feebly, hands caked in his own blood. “Sam, I’m done for.  _ Go. _ Get the Colt. It’s right there.  _ Sam. _ ”

“ _ No _ .”

Sam clutches Dean tight, clenches her teeth so hard one of her molars cracks, and with a BANG, Dean vanishes.

CUT.

He collapses on the floor of a hospital. Clamor. Immediately, nurses rush into action. 

CUT. 

Sam sways from the surge of power. Ellen begins to stir. She blinks, rolls onto her stomach, struggles to her feet, staggers out of the mansion’s door. She looks at the Colt. Then back at a drained Sam.

“Here.” She kicks it across the floor. Sam picks it up. It’s loaded and powerful. It stings to hold.

CUT.

Bela is clambering into her car to make her getaway, but the tire is still flat. A bang, and another tire is shot out. Bela jerks her head to one side, not moving properly, still in shock. She’s filthy, reeking, a far cry from how she appeared at this episode’s start. 

John has freed himself from his restraints, has emerged from the house behind her. 

“Bela,” he pleads. “Bells.”

Bela stops trying to jumpstart her damaged car. Her head lolls forward, eyes shut. She staggers to her feet. 

“Your son’s dying,” Bela says to John without preamble, leaning against her mud-spattered car to support herself. “Tit for tat.”

“Dean?” John’s voice has instant alarm. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I shot him.”

John stares at her in disbelief.

“I shot him,” Bela repeats. “I shot your kid. Look.” Something in her cracks open. “There’s no point. I’m going to Hell anyway.” Tears from her eyes now, streaking through the grime and blood on her face. “I killed a kid. I’m going to Hell anyway.”

John seems as though can’t process. “Bells, he isn’t dead. Don’t talk like that.” And, unbelievably, John reaches for her--to hold her, to comfort her--

Bela snaps away with a growl. “Where’s my son?”

“Your attic,” John admits, a tad sheepish.

Bela exhales all her breath in a defeated gust. “You were never gonna hurt him, were you?”

“Of course not,” John says. “He’s my kid, too.”

And who should show up then but three black eyed demons.

Standing in formation around their leader Meg. 

CUT.

Sam sees Meg’s cohort of demons before she sees Meg. Takes the Colt, aims it, takes out the demons like it’s nothing. Their bodies flash red, orange, their skin peels like paper, and they drop, one after the other. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

As they fall, they reveal Meg, head held high, in their midst.

Ellen springs forward and gives an incoherent scream of rage. She rushes Meg, no thoughts in her head but revenge, tear, punch-

“Whoa!” Sam shouts. “Ellen, what?”

Ellen jumps at Meg, who teleports three feet to the side, sending an already-injured Ellen tripping over nothing and collapsing again. 

“Meg?” Sam asks. Standing at the top of Bela’s stairs, she stares down at her friend.

Who has a gun. And jet black eyes.

“M-” her voice shakes, betrayal writ large, an opening hole, a chasm. “Meg?”

“That’s the demon who killed Ash,” Ellen shouts, jerking herself to her feet. “That’s her, that’s the demon that killed Ash!” she sprints at Meg again, who easily sidesteps and pulls Ellen’s hair back painfully. Ellen’s head jerks and she falls with a grunt. 

“You?” Sam breaths, stock still.

“Guilty,” Meg admits with a grin and a simper. 

Sam reaches into her back pocket. Not the Colt, her pistol.

And shoots her. 

The bullet lodges in her thigh and a look of irritation flashes across Meg’s face. “You know, after everything I’ve heard about you and your brother’s skills as hunters, I gotta say, I’m a little underwhelmed.” Sam shoots her again, nicks her shoulder. “That’s no way to treat a friend,” Meg snarks. “Come on, Sam. Hand over the Colt.”

Sam stares at Meg’s black eyes, at the grime and blood on her face. Flashes back to every smile, every moment of kindness Meg showed her. The sympathy for Jake. The hand on her arm, the food, the water, the car ride, the comfort. A friend, a tether, a  _ helper _ , a lie. A demon.

Sam’s deadness is slowly ebbing, replaced by something surging, a panic, a rage. “DAD!” she yells.

John seems to come to his senses. Sees Sam, Meg about to confront her. After what seems like an inner war, he shoots and fires with a wobbly hand. The bullet lands with a sickening smack into the flesh of Meg’s calf.

She looks back at him, irritated. And Sam draws the Colt and shoots her point-blank in the hip.

Meg SCREAMS. 

Behind her skin her skeleton flashes red, orange. She gags, the air punches out of her, and she drops. The Colt worked. She’s bleeding. 

“Dig out the bullet,” John shouts. But Sam’s busy with something else, digging out the Key of Solomon, cracking it to the bookmarked page.

“You gonna read me a story?” Meg rasps out. She closes her eyes, attempting to teleport, but more blood spurts from the wound. “Augh.” She curls up, panting. 

“Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus--”

“An exorcism?” Meg’s voice pitches up into a whine. “Seriously?!” 

“SAM, GET AWAY FROM HER,” John shouts. “STOP!” 

Sam ignores him. “Omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica. Ergo, omnis legio diabolica--”

A rumbling. Clouds converge in the sky.

“I’m gonna kill you,” Meg pants. “I’m gonna rip all the bones from your body.” 

“--Adiuramus te…cessa decipere humanas creaturas, eisque æternæ perditionìs venenum propinare…Vade, satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciæ, hostis humanæ salutis…Humiliare sub potenti manu Dei; contremisce et effuge--”

“I’m gonna skin you,” Meg’s body is glitching, shaking, “I’m gonna eat you alive--”

Sam’s voice shakes. “Invocato a nobis sancto et terribili nomine…quem inferi tremunt…Ab insidiis diaboli, libera nos, Domine. Ut Ecclesiam tuam secura tibi facias libertate servire, te rogamus…” Two words left and she stops.

“I’ll be back,” Meg hisses, blood climbing into her eyes. “I’ll claw my way back out of hell and I’ll finish what I started. I’ll claw your stomach out, little _ trusting _ Sam.”

There’s a girl in there. Meg isn’t a demon, she’s a girl possessed by one. The demon keeps the girl alive; remove it, and Meg’s been shot three times, she’s—

“Audi NOS!” hollers Ellen.

Meg howls, arcs up onto her knees. Bones crack, blood spatters. A wail. Meg’s jaw opens wide, wider, and black smoke drops out in globs, thick and disgusting, poison. It’s sucked into the ground.

Gone.

The body falls, limp, onto singed grass. Blood starts pouring. A bullet in Meg’s thigh, in her spine, in the shattered bone of her hip. She’s unconscious.

Sam pulls off her jacket, staunches the wounds. It’s not too late. It might not be too late. If they can stop her going into shock from blood loss—

John has his car. “Hospital,” Sam manages. “Now.”

She’s dizzy. The sight of blood makes her nauseous; she’s gonna pass out. Meg might die. Dean might be already dead. She’s fading.

There’s a noise coming from behind her. From the backpack she’s wearing. A vibrating, a dinging noise. Or is it coming from inside her head?

“Sam,” John murmurs. “Sam, you did beautifully. You’re a real hunter, Sam.”

“No, no,” Sam pushes him away, “Help Meg. H,” she swallows. “Ellen. Help Meg.”

Ellen leans over, hisses at the sight of the girl’s wounds.

“Sam,” John has an expression of outright wonder on his face. “You are a warrior.” 

“I don’t want to be,” Sam manages. Her heart rate is too fast, and the ringing won’t stop. “It was too easy. It scared me, it scared me. Dad. Those demons. I killed three. People. They were demons inside people. People.” Not enough air. “I don’t.” Her chest is heaving. “I don’t want to be a killer. And I killed.” A confession that comes too late. “Dad, I don’t want to hunt.”

“That’s all right,” John says soothingly. “Sam. That’s all right. Give me the Colt. Your brother and I can take it from here. We can take it from here, Sam. I’ll take the gun.”

Sam stares at nothing, hazy.

Then her eyes widen. There’s a buzzing in her ears, a white noise, a silence. And sudden clarity. The ringing. Ash’s ding-dong-demon device going haywire.

She stares at her dad.

“You’re not my dad,” she realises. She scrambles back. “You’re not my dad.”

“Sam—”

“You’re not my dad. Dad would never let me  _ opt out _ of hunting. That’s his  _ life _ . Revenge on Mom is his  _ life _ . He would never congratulate me on wasting,” she counts in her head, “Three bullets. Four? Saying I did a good job.” Her voice is bitter. “You’re not my dad.”

She aims the Colt at him.

“Sam—”

“You’re  _ not _ my Dad.”

Slowly, John Winchester’s eyes turn yellow.

“So shoot me,” Azazel says, spreading his arms. 

“Fine.” Sam lands a bullet in his knee. John-Azazel screams; his skeleton flashes orange, like Meg’s. For an instant, John’s eyes are back to their normal brown.

“Kill me,” he bursts out. “Kill me, kill the demon, end it—”

Sam hyperventilates. Shakes her head so hard her vision blurs.

“Sam, please-”

The wailing of an ambulance in the distance, the one Sam had called for Dean.

John whirls toward the sound. Spasms. Jerks. Yellow-black smoke pours out of his unhinged jaw, zips off into the horizon. The demon device shuts down.

Sam watches it go, sways, and collapses.

CUT. 

The hospital. Cool blue, medical, sterile. Margaret Ruth Masters in the Emergency section, on life support, bandaged heavily, breathing through a tube—but breathing. Sam at her side, dirty but uninjured, staring expressionlessly at her. 

“It’s lucky you called when you did,” a nurse tells her. “You saved her life.”

Sam nods wordlessly. “Can you take me to my brother?”

The nurse’s face blips. Bad news, then.

“He’s dead?” Sam asks dully.

“Is your brother…” the nurse thinks for a moment. “Green… shirt? Spiky hair?”

“That’s him.”

“Follow me.”

CUT.

Sam enters Dean’s hospital room. She inhales carefully, bites her lip. 

No words. The nurse brings Sam a chair and she sits down heavily. Close-up on her face. She’s crying.

CUT.

A tessellating sea of memories. Sam and Dean as kids, splashing in a motel pool. Chasing each other through an aisle under the halogen lights of a Costco. Sam making up a pretend game, Dean reluctantly going along with it, playing a knight or a princess or whatever Sam decided the scenario was. Tic-tac-toe. Taking turns playing brick-breaker on Dad’s shitty cell. Screaming fights at the dinner table, laughing about it years later.

Slowly, Dean surfaces from blackness.

He blinks. The hospital ceiling comes into view, hazy, swinging, pale blue and white and too-yellow light. Wires - no, tubes - coming in and out of his arms and chest. 

He turns his head to see Sam, Sam who somehow got him here, Sam sitting beside him with a tear-streaked face, staring pointedly out the window.

“Sam,” Dean croaks, his heart swelling. “Sam. Did we find Dad?”

She doesn’t turn. Dean supposes that’s fair; he was dumb to get shot. Scared the shit out of her. And I guess it’s fair that, when Dean is half-toast, Sam wouldn’t want to talk about John. Well. If she’s not looking at him it’ll be easier to say what he wants to say.

He clears his throat. Flicks his eyes away, then back. A recent memory bubbles out of dimness, converges with the others. 

_ “Well…” Dean turns to Sam, “You and I are friends.” _

_ “We’re siblings, so it doesn’t count.” _

“It does count,” Dean says haltingly, as if he’s only realising it now. “It does. Okay, this is gonna be a cheese-fest, but I’m putin’ it out there, so bear with me. Ahem: it does count.” A dramatic pause. “That we’re siblings. I mean - you’re my sister, but you’re my friend, too. Is what I’m saying. I… you know. It’s cool to spend time with you. Being back in the business together, it’s good. You’re good. You’re not just my sister, you’re my _partner in crime_ , Sammy. You got me here, didn’t you? You ’n Dad prob’ly busted ass. Saved my life. And, uh, I didn’t say it before…” It’s hard to say it, but Sam’s earned it. “But while you were at school, I m- I mean, yeah. I missed you. There, I said it. I missed you.” He waits for Sam’s reaction. “Sam. Hello?? Sam. Sam, I just said I missed you. Aren’t you gonna congratulate me for expressing emotion or some girly shit like that?” 

Nothing.

“Come on, Sam, you hate when I say things like ‘girly shit.’ Don’t you?”

Sam makes no response except to sniff and let another tear drop from her eye, and she looks right at him and - and -

Starts to murmur a prayer?

And okay, yeah, even for Sam that’s majorly weird. “Sammy?”

He shifts, climbs out of the bed, squats to get to her eye-level “Sam?”

A nurse comes in almost silently, an IV bag in her hand. Sam turns to her as though she’s looking right through Dean. “When’s he gonna wake up?”

The nurse sighs. “I’m sorry, hon. I don’t know.”

And that’s bad. That’s - this is either a joke or it’s major-league, full-nine-yards, fifth-base-with-all-of-the-Cartwright-Twins BAD. “Hey,” Dean shouts. “Hey! This isn’t goddamn funny!” He turns to the nurse, catches sight of the hospital bed out of the corner of his eye.

If that bruised and bloody fucker is him, he’s in it.

In the bed. Unresponsive.

And then Sam’s tears make sense.

As Bobby would say, Balls.

Dean uses a word a little bit stronger.

_ Don’t go out tonight; it’s bound to take your life... _

“Fuck.”

He covers his mouth, bites the inside of his lip. “Is this it?” he asks no-one. He looks up, half-sarcastic, only a little bit vulnerable, even now. “This is it, huh? This is all I get, is that it? I gotta ditch Sam  _ now _ ?” Silence, of course. Dean spits. “You know what? Fuck that.”

He crosses the room, throws himself down on the edge of his own bed. Sam has taken his hand. She’s looking down.

Dean looks at her. Tears sting. And Sam breaks into all-out sobs.

“Easy there, Sammy,” Dean murmurs, his own vision blurry. “Easy there.”

And on that - Dean’s last words to Sam’s a perfect mirror of his first - we fade to black.

CUT.

End music: In My Time of Dying by Led Zeppelin (of course.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELLLLLLL that about sums it up. thanks ENDLESSLY ENDLESSLY to sadie who beta'd this last chapter
> 
> season two coming soon!!!!!


End file.
